AMERICA  and  the 

YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

HAROLD    STEARNS 


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America  and  the 
Young  Intellectual 


BY 

HAROLD    STEARNS 


NEW  xlJP  YORK 
GEORGE  H.   DORAN  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,    1921, 
BY   GEORGE   H.    DORAN   COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,    1920,  1921,  BY   THE   FREEMAN,    INC. 

COPYRIGHT,    I9l8,    BY   THE   DIAL   PUBLISHING   COMPANY,    INC. 


PRINTED   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES   OF  AMERICA 


CONTENTS 


America  and  the  Young  Intellectual 
VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and  Creator 
A  Study  in  Docility 

La  PEUR  de  la  VlE 

WHERE  Are  Our  INTELLECTUALS? 

Illusions  of  the  Sophisticated 
Lost  in  the  Crowd 
An  Intellectual  Eggshell  Period 
A  Question  of  Morals     . 

AU-DESSOUS  de  la  MELEE    . 

Common  Sense  About  France 

Overdone 

A  Dilapidated  Scarecrow 
Bigotry  and  Class-Consciousness 
Science  and  Common  Sense     . 
Roots  of  Anti-British  Feeling 


PACK 

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24 

34 
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46 

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59 

65 

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77 
82 

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96 

100 

105 

112 


CONTENTS 

Progress  versus  Industrialism 
The  Twilight  of  the  Gods 
The  Country  versus  the  Town 
The  Claims  of  Loyalty  . 

Through  ART  to  INDIVIDUALISM 

What  Can  a  Young  Man  Do? 


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AMERICA  and  the 
YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG 
INTELLECTUAL 

A  short  time  ago  Stuart  P.  Sherman  wrote  an 
article,1  called  "The  National  Genius,"  which  is 
somewhat  of  a  misnomer  inasmuch  as  the  sub- 
stance of  the  discussion  is  really  a  hortatory 
appeal  to  our  younger  artists  and  writers.  The 
article  is  written  with  humour  and  vigour;  it  is 
extremely  able  and  clear,  setting  forth  a  definite 
point  of  view  the  implications  of  which  suggest  a 
consistent  philosophy  of  life.  It  is  because  Mr. 
Sherman  makes  articulate  an  attitude  more  or  less 
consciously  shared  by  the  majority  of  what  we  may 
term  the  tolerant  and  enlightened  part  of  the  genera- 
tion preceding  us,  and  because,  in  common  with  a 
much  larger  group  of  the  younger  generation  than 
Mr.  Sherman  suspects,  I  believe  this  attitude  a  rather 
tragically  ill-informed  one,  that  I  have  ventured  to 
reply  to  it.  The  problem  of  America  and,  or  as  I 
should  say,  versus  the  young  intellectual — and  why, 
in  the  simplest  sense  of  interest  in  intellectual  things, 
should  we  hesitate  to  use  the  term?  why  should  it 
carry  with  it  a  faint  aura  of  effeminate  gentility? — 
is  of  first-rate  importance.  Discussion  of  it  illumi- 
nates many  aspects  of  our  cultural  life.  And  never 
was  it  more  timely  than  to-day. 

Let  me  begin  by  stating  as  straightforwardly  as 
I  can  Mr.  Sherman's  main  contentions. 

1  The  Atlantic,  January,  1921. 

9 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

Mr.  Sherman  pictures  himself  at  a  typical  Ameri- 
can public  dinner,  which  H.  L.  Mencken  might  char- 
acterise as  a  Rotary  Club  jubilee  entirely  controlled 
by  rugged  right-thinkers.  At  all  events  there  is 
much  talk  of  progress  and  efficiency,  increased  pro- 
duction, sanitation,  and  sobriety;  and  a  future  re- 
public flowing  with  milk  and  honey  so  potent  that 
everybody  will  then  have  a  flivver,  a  phonograph 
and  hundreds  of  classical  records,  a  patent  sewage 
system,  and  a  wireless  telephone,  as  well  as  an  in- 
dividual aeroplane  to  transport  him  from  his  im- 
maculate home  to  his  electric-tractor-ploughed  field 
or  to  his  model  factory.  Churches  and  universities 
will  flourish,  and  all  the  highroads  be  macadamized. 
Citizens  of  this  ideal  state  will  be  diseaseless,  active, 
moral,  and  above  all  prosperous.  The  picture  of  the 
future  United  States  is  the  conventional  roseate 
Utopia  dreamed  of  by  all  forward-lookers  and 
mechanical  engineers.  It  is  to  be  American  through 
and  through — that  is,  shot  through  and  through  with 
moral  idealism. 

Perhaps  as  an  after-thought,  the  chairman  of  the 
dinner  then  calls  upon  a  young  literary  artist  "to 
sketch  a  place  in  our  programme  of  democratic  prog- 
ress for  art,  music,  literature,  and  the  like — in  short, 
for  the  superfluous  things."  The  phrase  grates  on 
Mr.  Sherman,  as  evidently  it  grated  on  the  young 
"literary  artist"  in  question.  For  this  gentleman, 
whom  Mr.  Sherman  makes  the  protagonist  for  all 
the  younger  generation  of  literary  and  artistic 
revoltes,  then  arises  and  delivers  himself  of  the  fol- 
lowing blasts:  ( I )  that  the  twin  incubi  of  Democracy 

10 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

and  Puritanism  have  made  beauty  a  prostitute  to 
utility,  and  that  the  younger  generation  of  artists 
and  writers  has  seen  through  the  solemn  humbug 
of  a  future  ideal  republic,  envisaging  the  failure  of 
civilisation  not  only  in  the  present  but  in  the  future; 
(2)  that  the  said  younger  generation  wants  only  to 
be  emancipated  from  the  kind  of  people  that  have 
spoken  earlier  at  this  dinner,  for  it  imports  its  philos- 
ophy in  fragments  from  beyond  the  borders  of 
Anglo-Saxonia — from  Ireland,  Germany,  France, 
and  Italy,  not  forgetting  to  draw  upon  "the  quick 
Semitic  intelligence";  (3)  that  art  is  "letting  oneself 
out  completely  and  perfectly,"  and  that  the  chief 
thing  to  let  out  is  the  long  repressed  sexual  impulses, 
recently  unearthed  by  that  prince  of  psychologists 
Professor  Sigmund  Freud,  for  "most  of  the  evil  in 
the  world  is  due  to  self-control." 

Now  the  justness  of  this  touching  picture  of  the 
younger  generation  of  artists  and  writers,  I  can 
hardly  leave  to  Mr.  Sherman's  conscience.  He  may 
personally  know  individuals  of  the  type  described 
above,  but  I  don't,  and  I  frankly  doubt  if  many  such 
individuals  exist.  Certainly  if  they  do,  they  are  not 
typical.  The  picture  Mr.  Sherman  has  sketched  is  a 
caricature  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word,  i.  e.,  a  kernel 
of  truth  covered  by  different  individual  absurdities 
and  weaknesses.  The  kernel  of  truth,  of  course,  is 
in  the  depiction  of  the  younger  generation  as  in 
revolt  against  the  right-thinkers  and  the  forward- 
lookers.  It  is  in  revolt;  it  does  dislike,  almost  to  the 
point  of  hatred  and  certainly  to  the  point  of  con- 
tempt, the  type  of  people  dominant  in  our  present 

II 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

civilisation,  the  people  who  actually  "run  things." 
I  shall  even  go  so  far  with  Mr.  Sherman  as  to  agree 
that  this  is  a  thoroughly  unfortunate  state  of  affairs 
— unfortunate  for  the  people  who  run  things,  but 
even  more  unfortunate  for  the  youngsters.  The  fact 
of  the  hostility  is  not  in  dispute.  But  I  do  most 
vigorously  dispute  the  reasons  Mr.  Sherman  gives 
for  its  existence,  the  individual  irresponsibility  he  im- 
plies. Quite  the  contrary  is  the  case,  as  I  shall  try 
to  show  later.  However,  to  return  to  the  argu- 
ment. .  .  . 

Mr.  Sherman  goes  home  rather  sadly  from  this 
dinner,  meditating  on  the  folly  of  youth  and  reflect- 
ing on  the  love  of  notoriety  in  all  ages.  The  Res- 
toration fellows,  too,  he  ponders,  were  likewise  in 
revolt  at  the  Puritans;  they  "let  themselves  out"  with 
a  vengeance;  did  not  two  wits  and  poets  of  good 
King  Charles  the  Second's  time  strip  themselves 
naked  and  run  through  the  streets,  singing  lascivious 
songs?  Yet  somehow  they  did  not  count,  these  Re- 
storation revoltes;  they  made  no  headway  against 
"the  sense  of  the  whole  English  nation."  They  left 
no  impress,  and  to-day  hardly  their  names  are  re- 
membered. 

Mr.  Sherman  continues  to  meditate.  Beauty,  he 
says,  whether  we  like  it  or  not,  has  a  heart  full  of 
service.  It  is  impossible  to  separate  art  from  the 
service  to  truth,  morals,  and  democracy.  Our  fore- 
fathers were  not  "grim";  did  they  not  envisage 
among  the  inalienable  rights  of  mankind  "the  pur- 
suit of  happiness"?  The  artist  must  send  us  these 
moments  of  happiness  and  delight  as  often  as  he  can; 

12 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

but  he  does  so  permanently  and  most  truly  not  by 
divorcing  himself  from  the  moralities  of  our  time 
and  custom  and  inviting  us  to  sensuous  indulgence, 
but  by  kindling  the  austerer  ministers  till  they  glow 
with  passion.  Further,  there  is  the  whole  question 
of  the  relation  of  the  artist  to  society.  Can  an  artist 
divorce  himself  from  it,  or  be  in  fundamental  revolt 
against  its  chief  characteristics?  Mr.  Sherman 
thinks  not.  But  then,  what  is  the  chief  characteristic 
of  American  society?  Its  moral  "idealism,"  he  re- 
plies, adroitly  quoting  Emerson,  Whitman,  and  Tho- 
reau,  even  Mr.  Spingarn  and  Mr.  Dreiser,  to  prove 
that  we  have  this  vital  national  culture.  Thus  we 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  artist  should  try  to 
make  contacts  with  that  national  culture,  fertilise  it, 
and  be  fertilised  by  it.  He  should,  so  to  speak, 
climb  on  the  national  band  wagon  of  moral  idealism 
and  see  that  a  few  gracious  aesthetic  roses  are  fes- 
tooned around  it  as  it  hurries  along  the  hard  road  of 
ethical  and  material  progress. 

First  of  all,  let  me  set  down  my  points  of  agree- 
ment with  Mr.  Sherman.  The  problem  of  the  rela- 
tion of  the  artist  and  writer  to  the  society  in  which 
he  lives  is  a  very  old  one,  and,  it  seems  to  me,  a 
great  deal  of  nonsense  is  talked  on  both  sides.  Of 
course  no  artist  can  completely  escape  his  milieu,  and 
of  course  in  one  respect  all  great  art  is  disinterested, 
timeless,  equally  true  for  all  ages  and  all  peoples, 
universal.  Yet  there  is  no  real  conflict  here;  and  as 
in  philosophy  the  problem  of  the  one  and  the  many, 
or  unity  in  diversity,  has,  so  to  speak,  only  a  specula- 
tive interest,  so  in  life  the  artist,  although  expressing 

13 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

something  universal,  must  do  it  with  the  materials, 
with  the  technique,  and  in  the  idiom  of  the  particular 
time  and  country  in  which  he  finds  himself.  He  will 
thus  be  disinterested  in  his  art,  or  his  form  of  gen- 
eralising the  particular,  only  in  proportion  to  the 
sharpness  and  keenness  of  his  interest  in  the  specific 
He  cannot  in  any  final  sense  put  by  the  civilisation  he 
lives  in.  And  I  think  it  basically  true  that  a  really 
great  artist,  or  writer,  will  express  the  age  to  which 
he  belongs.  He  will  speak  the  language  of  all  hu- 
manity, yet  usually  in  a  provincial  accent.  In  this 
sense,  I  agree  with  Mr.  Sherman.  After  all,  great 
art  is  art  of  acceptance  and  fulfilment  of  life;  rarely 
of  repudiation  and  contempt,  and  never  oF  in- 
difference. 

Here  allow  me  a  relevant  digression.  In  The 
Freeman  for  the  issue  of  the  week  of  January  26, 
Albert  Jay  Nock,  one  of  the  editors,  offers  a  few 
words  of  advice  to  Messrs.  Sinclair  Lewis,  Floyd 
Dell,  Sherwood  Anderson,  and  Waldo  Frank,  whose 
latest  novels — all  of  them  dealing  with  contemporary 
American  social  life,  and  with  the  life  of  the  middle 
west  in  particular — have  appeared  with  a  curious  and 
provocative  simultaneity.  All  of  our  novelists,  Mr. 
Nock  implies — and  these  younger  men  no  less  than 
the  others — write  with  a  certain  preoccupation;  they 
have  not  their  inner  eye  on  the  central  truth  of  the 
situation  or  the  ultimate  truth  of  the  characters  they 
depict,  both  of  which  are  independent  of  time  or 
place.  They  are  preoccupied  with  the  externals  to 
the  detriment  of  their  art,  which  should  concern 
itself  solely  with  "great  emotions,  great  spiritual  ex- 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

periences,  great  actions."  Many  of  our  older 
novelists,  like  Mr.  Howells,  were  primarily  con- 
cerned with  niceness,  as  a  different  stamp,  like  Wil- 
liam Allen  White,  are  primarily  concerned  with 
morality  and  Americanism,  so  called.  But  the 
younger  writers  equally  put  their  primary  concern  in 
disparagement  of  niceness,  morality,  and  American- 
ism. Mr.  Nock  cites  the  example  of  Gogol  in  re- 
buttal to  them  all,  Gogol,  he  says,  although  he  lived 
in  a  regime  of  Russian  despotism  and  bureaucratic 
stupidity  beside  which  the  recent  ministrations  of 
Mr.  Palmer  and  Mr.  Burleson  in  our  own  country 
appear  the  handiwork  of  mere  amateurs,  still  con- 
trived to  do  classic  work,  and  he  did  it  by  ignoring 
that  regime,  by  putting  by  the  civilisation  he  lived  in. 
The  qualities  that  distinguish  his  work  are  tender- 
ness, disinterestedness,  and  serenity,  and  these  quali- 
ties could  express  themselves  in  his  work  in  spite  of  a 
hostile  environment.  Let  Messrs.  Lewis,  Dell, 
Anderson,  and  Frank  go  and  do  likewise,  is  Mr. 
Nock's  advice.  Let  them  also  forget  their  environ- 
ment in  the  sense  in  which  Gogol  did;  let  them  not 
be  preoccupied  with  it  to  the  extent  of  allowing  it  to 
impinge,  even  for  a  moment,  on  their  art.  They  can 
do  classic  work  no  matter  if  the  republic  falls,  and 
the  Japanese  occupy  California,  and  the  Mexicans, 
New  Orleans. 

Now  although  it  would  no  doubt  be  an  excellent 
thing  if  our  young  novelists  captured  some  of  the 
qualities  that  distinguish  Gogol's  work — that  is,  if 
they  came  by  those  qualities  honestly  and  not  imita- 
tively — I  cannot  help  feeling  that  Mr.  Nock  is  giving 

15 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

advice  where  it  is  not  needed,  namely,  to  geniuses. 
Provided  Messrs.  Lewis,  Dell,  Anderson,  and  Frank 
are  geniuses,  they  will  not  need  Mr.  Nock's  advice 
anyway;  provided  they  are  not  geniuses,  it  cannot  do 
them  any  ultimate  good.  Neither  I,  nor  Mr.  Nock, 
nor  Mr.  Sherman,  need  to  worry  about  the  real 
genius  when  he  appears ;  he  will  be  amply  able  to  look 
after  himself.  He  will  ignore  his  environment,  or 
repudiate  it,  or  challenge  it,  or  change  it,  as  he 
pleases.  Furthermore,  I  also  cannot  help  feeling 
that  Gogol's  genius,  great  as  it  was,  was  a  rather 
narrow  and  special  one;  and  that  the  truly  great 
artist  does  not  put  by  his  contemporary  civilisation, 
but  that  he  reflects  and  justifies  it.  One  thinks  of 
Pericles,  and  Shakespeare,  and  Rabelais — universal, 
to  be  sure,  yet  each  one  impossible  in  himself  with- 
out his  peculiar  age  and  civilisation.  For  strive  as 
we  will  to  put  aesthetic  values  at  the  top  of  the  ethical 
hierarchy  (and  I  confess  I  think  that  is  where  they 
belong),  in  order  to  be  at  that  top,  there  must  be 
something  under  them.  A  man  is  a  man  and  a  citi- 
zen even  before  he  is  an  artist;  and  in  the  work  of 
the  highest  genius,  it  seems  to  me,  all  the  claims  of 
these  different  sides  of  life  are  coordinated  and 
unified. 

Yet  in  any  event,  whatever  the  question  about  a 
special  type  of  genius,  such  as  Gogol,  ignoring  his 
civilisation,  or  about  whether  the  highest  type  of 
genius  does  or  does  not  ignore  it  (and  I  certainly 
believe  he  does  not) ,  there  can  be  no  question  at  all 
that  the  young  intellectual,  the  person  not  a  genius, 
yet  with  a  certain  competence  and  a  real  interest  in 

16 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

humanistic  things,  must  give  heed  to  it.  He  will, 
perforce,  be  a  part  of  the  social  and  economic  and 
educational  machinery  of  the  country,  albeit  it  may 
be  only  a  dissentient  part.  He  will  be  interested  in 
politics,  in  contemporary  literature,  in  the  type  of 
university  life  we  possess,  in  science,  in  art  and  the 
American  theatre,  in  the  labour  movement.  He  can- 
not, and  will  not  wish  to,  escape  any  of  these  inter- 
ests. There  will  be  the  insistent  problem  of  making 
a  living  in  an  environment  where,  admittedly,  interest 
in  intellectual  things  can  hardly  be  said  to  yield  quick 
or  high  dividends.  Above  all  there  will  be,  as  Mr. 
Sherman  himself  says,  quoting  from  the  forefathers, 
"the  pursuit  of  happiness."  As  a  rational  individual 
he  will  desire  for  himself  a  happy,  or  as  Aristotle 
puts  it,  the  "good"  life.  He  will  recognise  that  he 
is  a  social  animal,  and  will  try  to  find  expression  of 
and  satisfaction  for  those  sides  of  his  nature.  But  he 
will  likewise  recognise  the  core  of  irreducible  indi- 
vidualism that  remains,  the  spiritual  integrity  as  a 
separate  entity  that  cannot  be  destroyed.  And  the 
happy  life  will  be  for  him  the  life  in  which  these  two 
legitimate  claims  are  harmonised  and  reinforce  one 
another.  Thus  far  I  can  go  along  with  Mr.  Sher- 
man, and  I  fancy  he  would  agree  with  the  general 
propositions  advanced  in  this  paragraph. 

The  trouble  comes  when  we  try  to  apply  these 
general  principles  concretely.  What  is  the  national 
culture  which  the  young  man  finds  confronting  him 
in  America  to-day,  and  what  are  types  of  leaders  of 
that  culture  with  whom  he  is  supposed  to  make  con- 
tact?   Mr.  Sherman  describes  that  culture  as  one 

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AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

predominantly  of  a  long  and  vigorous  tradition,  still 
in  active  functioning,  of  moral  idealism.  He  hesi- 
tates to  name  the  leaders  of  it — that  is,  the  con- 
temporary leaders,  for  there  is  a  sentimental  pas- 
sage about  Lincoln  which  by  implication  suggests 
that  his  spirit  still  lives  in  his  successors. 

It  is  not  my  business  to  quarrel  with  Mr.  Sherman 
about  what  really  constitutes  American  national  cul- 
ture, although  I  believe  he  is  thoroughly  wrong  in 
his  judgment.  As  well  as  a  single  phrase  can  describe 
it,  our  genuine  national  culture,  I  think,  is  one  of 
almost  belligerent  individualism.  To  be  sure,  a  cer- 
tain pioneer  social  docility  went  with  this,  for  in  a 
new  country,  where  living  was  precarious  and  danger- 
ous, all  within  the  group  had  to  conform  if  it  was  to 
be  successful  in  its  adventure.  When,  nevertheless, 
the  pressure  of  that  social  conformity  became  too 
great  to  be  endured,  the  individual  could  always  go 
west,  either  alone  or  with  his  family.  He  could 
strike  out  for  himself,  and  lead  the  kind  of  life  he 
chose,  worship  God  as  he  chose.  Precisely  this  type 
of  adventurous  pioneers,  unafraid  of  the  hazard  of 
new  dangers,  did  people  our  country:  it  is  their  spirit, 
I  think,  which  still  constitutes  the  real  American  na- 
tional genius,  however  much  that  genius  may  be 
smothered  and  thwarted  to-day  in  a  land  that  is 
rapidly  filling  up  and  that  has  already  passed  the  turn 
from  an  agrarian  to  an  industrial  nation.  A  good 
many  of  the  younger  generation  would  be  glad  to 
see  a  return  to  that  early  sturdy  individualism;  I 
myself  think  affectionately  of  my  New  England  fore- 
fathers who  kept  their  blunderbuss  well  polished  and 

1 8 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

hung  in  a  conspicuous  place  on  the  wall,  ready  for 
highly  individualistic  use  against  the  exactions  of  any 
too  tyrannical  government. 

However,  forgetting  for  the  moment  the  question 
of  tradition,  what  are  the  facts?  Will  Mr.  Sherman 
seriously  maintain  that  he  finds  a  genuine  moral  ideal- 
ism dominating  the  country  to-day?  Surely  he  is 
not  so  naive  as  to  confuse  the  reformistic  and  "up- 
lift" tendencies  of  our  national  life — the  Pollyanna 
optimism;  prohibition;  blue  laws;  exaggerated  rev- 
erence for  women;  home  and  foreign  missions;  Prot- 
estant clericalism — with  anything  a  civilised  man  can 
legitimately  call  moral  idealism.  If  he  looks  things 
squarely  in  the  face,  he  must  recognise  these  mani- 
festations of  American  life  as  in  no  way  related  to 
moral  idealism;  they  are  the  fine  flower  of  timidity 
and  fear  and  ignorance.  If  Mr.  Sherman  were  not 
so  hostile  to  Freudian  psychology  that  he  persistently 
refuses  to  understand  it  (if  ever  there  was  a  scientific 
justification  of  the  ethical  need  of  restraint,  it  is  to 
be  found  there),  I  should  point  out  to  him  that  this 
so-called  "moral  idealism"  is  merely  what  any  good 
psychiatrist  would  instantly  recognise  as  the  morbid 
perversities  which  conventionally  accompany  a  deeply 
dissatisfied  human  life.  For  it  hardly  needs  arguing 
that  moral  idealism  begins  with  intelligence;  the 
trouble  with  what  Mr.  Sherman  is  pleased  to  describe 
as  American  moral  idealism  is  simply  that  it  is  illiter- 
ate— it  is  on  the  same  basis  of  reasoning  as  that  of 
a  fanatic  who  says  that  because  there  is  adultery  in 
the  world,  we  should  kill  off  all  women,  or  because 
there  is  murder,  we  should  cease  to  make  knives  and 

19 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

pistols.  It  is  the  moral  idealism  of  outward  compul- 
sion as  against  the  moral  idealism  of  inner  restraint; 
the  moral  order  that  comes  from  authority  as  against 
the  moral  order  that  comes  from  freedom.  Which 
does  Mr.  Sherman  really  prefer? 

It  is  significant  that  he  does  not  mention  the  leaders 
of  this  national  culture.  Let  me  be  specific.  Suppose 
a  young  man,  just  out  of  college  and  returned  to  his 
moderate-sized  home  town  in  Ohio  (why  not 
Marion?),  honestly  tries  to  make  those  contacts  with 
the  national  culture  which  Mr.  Sherman  so  vigor- 
ously urges  him  to  make.  First  he  tries  business; 
where  will  he  find  the  idealistic  business  man  with  a 
vision  of  a  future  great  moral  republic — 1  mean  a 
real  vision  and  not  a  hypocritical  pretence  put  on 
for  the  sake  of  the  neighbours?  Next  he  tries  poli- 
tics; where  can  he  in  fact  go  but  to  those  leaders  who 
took  a  local  pride  in  rolling  up  a  big  majority  for 
Brother  Warren?  Then  he  tries  reform  and  the 
labour  movement;  can  he  go  to  a  better  place  than  to 
the  leader  of  the  local  Woman's  Christian  Temper- 
ance Union  and  possibly  to  the  enthusiastic  local 
manager  of  a  national  "Open  Shop"  campaign? 
Finally,  he  tries  music,  art,  and  literature;  but  here 
my  hand  falters,  the  picture  is  too  pathetic.  Perhaps 
he  ignores  all  these  activities;  he  wants  merely  to 
live  a  gracious,  and  amiable,  and  civilised  life  for 
himself,  to  be  part  of  an  interesting  and  intellectual 
social  group  and  do  his  work  honestly  within  it,  for- 
getting the  harshness  of  the  environment.  Frankly, 
has  he  one  chance  in  a  hundred?  Does  Mr.  Sherman 
seriously  imagine  Mr.  Anderson  being  fertilised  by 

20 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

contact  with  his  congressman?  myself  (if  he  knew 
my  liking  for  wine)  being  enlightened  by  talking 
with  Mr.  Volstead?  Mr.  Lewis  becoming  civilised 
by  long  conference  with  Dr.  Wilbur  F.  Crafts? 

No,  what  the  young  intellectual  actually  finds  is 
that  moral  idealism  is  precisely  what  the  institutional 
life  of  America  to-day  does  not  want.  For  moral 
idealism,  if  it  means  anything,  means  fearlessness 
before  the  facts  and  willingness  to  face  them,  intel- 
lectual integrity,  emotional  honesty,  the  attempt  to 
win  a  moral  order  out  of  the  jungle  of  experience 
without  bias,  without  any  axe  to  grind,  without 
native  prejudice.  This  kind  of  moral  ideal- 
ism the  younger  generation  has  in  large  measure; 
and  it  is  just  this  kind  of  moral  idealism  which  the 
younger  generation  finds  nowhere  existent  in  Ameri- 
can national  life  to-day.  The  whole  drift  and  direc- 
tion of  our  national  life,  under  the  control  of  a 
malignant  and  stupid  minority,  fears  this  kind  of 
moral  idealism  as  it  fears  hell  itself.  In  our  national 
life  to-day  the  young  intellectual  speedily  finds  that 
he  is  not  wanted.  And  particularly  he  is  not  wanted 
if  he  strives  to  accomplish  just  those  objects,  which 
in  the  abstract  Mr.  Sherman  would  be  the  first  to 
praise — I  mean  intellectual  integrity  and  personal 
honesty  before  the  facts  of  life. 

Mr.  Sherman  should  try  to  put  the  problem  to 
himself  as  concretely  as  I  have  attempted  here 
sketchily  to  do.  If  he  did,  possibly  he  would  avoid 
his  most  serious  blunder  of  all — the  notion  that  the 
young  rcvoltes  are  merely  so  for  the  sake  of  per- 
sonal indulgence,  and  because  they  find  moral  dis- 

21 


sj 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

cipline  irksome.  Nothing  could  be  more  grotesque. 
They  revolt  simply  at  the  hollowness  and  hypocrisy 
of  the  standards  they  are  supposed  to  worship.  They 
revolt  not  in  order  to  avoid  discipline,  but  in  order 
to  take  the  first  step  toward  a  real  discipline,  i.  e., 
a  discipline  based  as  far  as  may  be  on  the  truth. 
They  do  not  revolt  for  the  fun  of  it,  even  if  a  few — 
Roosevelt  invented  the  phrase  "lunatic  fringe,"  and 
like  almost  every  other  group  the  younger  men  have 
theirs — appear  to  do  so.  They  revolt  because  they 
passionately  want  the  opportunity  to  do  honest  work, 
serious  work,  intelligent  work.  And  they  know,  what 
Mr.  Sherman  for  all  his  scholarship  seems  never  to 
have  learned,  that  such  work  is  impossible  unless 
they  are  free,  and  futile  unless  the  civilisation  it 
occurs  in  welcomes  it. 

Critics  have  often  wondered  why  we  have  not  pro- 
duced "great"  art  and  literature.  Perhaps  here  we 
have  the  explanation.  I  have  already  hinted  my  own 
belief  that  great  art  is  the  expression  of  an  age,  and 
that  age  must  itself  be  great.  Ours  is  not;  it  has 
nothing  to  express.  This  in  itself  would  be  nothing 
much  to  weep  over;  many  ages  have  been  fallow. 
But  it  is  discouraging  to  find  this  curiously  persistent 
hostility  on  the  part  of  the  older  generation  (of 
course  in  point  of  view,  not  necessarily  in  age)  to- 
ward all  of  the  younger  generation's  attempt  to 
make  our  national  life  a  little  nearer  to  greatness — 
to  make  it  more  honest,  more  fearless,  more  intel- 
lectually straightforward,  more  humanly  free,  more 
rational.  Of  course  our  young  intellectuals  waste 
much  time  in  discovering  the  hollowness  of  our  insti- 

22 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

tutions;  of  course  their  tone  is  often  fretful  and  peev- 
ish; of  course  there  are  always  those  to  identify 
freedom  with  mere  running  away  from  life  and  play- 
ing like  a  happy  animal.  Yet  surely  a  man  of  Mr. 
Sherman's  intelligence  and  sympathy  should  be  able 
to  discern  the  reality  beneath  the  appearance.  The 
fact  remains,  he  does  not;  and  when  1  say  he,  I  think 
of  the  whole  class  he  represents.  Even  the  intelli- 
gent and  tolerant  desert  us.  Can  we  be  blamed  if 
we  suspect  that  beneath  the  ostensible  reasons  lie 
others — fear  primarily,  fear  that  an  honest  attempt 
to  understand  our  point  of  view  might  make  them 
deeply  uncomfortable  and  dissatisfied?  It  is  only  a 
suspicion,  but  it  is  a  growing  one. 


23 


VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and 
Creator 

When  "The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain"  appeared 
early  in  the  spring  of  last  year,  the  instantaneous 
and  rather  excited  critical  attention  it  received  was 
a  clear  indication  that  its  author,  Mr.  Van  Wyck 
Brooks,  had  hit  the  mark,  for  better  or  for  worse. 
Many  reviewers  were  of  the  opinion  that  it  was  de- 
cidedly for  the  worse,  and  did  not  hesitate  to  say  so 
in  no  uncertain  terms.  More  discriminating  ap- 
praisers found  many  minor  points  to  challenge,  yet 
on  the  whole  recognised  the  power  and  novelty  of 
the  volume.  In  fact,  the  title  itself  was  somewhat 
provocative.  To  be  sure,  since  Mark  Twain's  death 
"The  Mysterious  Stranger"  had  been  published,  and 
there  was  a  kind  of  dim  public  awareness  of  the  fact 
that  the  soul  of  our  greatest  humourist  had  been 
troubled,  that  a  few  black  clouds  had  perhaps  hurried 
across  the  sunshine  of  a  national  myth.  Neverthe- 
less, the  main  outlines  of  that  myth  have  remained 
unchanged:  Mark  Twain  the  successful,  the  happy, 
the  loved,  the  ever-cheery.  And  there  was  something 
chilling  in  the  title  of  this  book — what  "ordeal"  had 
Mark  Twain  ever  gone  through?  What  did  the 
author  mean  by  such  a  title? 

The  strange  part  of  it  was  that  the  author  meant 
exactly  what  he  said.  He  meant  an  "ordeal,"  and 
all  that  an  ordeal  implies.     He  meant  even  more: 

24 


VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and  Creator 

that  Mark  Twain  had  not  surmounted  it  success- 
fully. He  meant  that,  whatever  the  outward  ap- 
pearance, Mark  Twain  had  been  fundamentally  a 
failure,  had  not  reached  his  artistic  majority;  that 
his  genius  had  been  frustrated  and  thwarted  into 
false  channels  by  a  harsh  and  obtuse  environment; 
that  the  inner  conflict  between  his  creative  impulses 
and  the  outer  social  claims  put  upon  him  was  severe 
and  prolonged;  that  a  writer  who  should  have  been 
one  of  the  satirists  of  all  time  was  in  reality,  except 
for  one  or  two  exceptions  of  a  so-to-speak  unguarded 
moment  (as  in  "Huckleberry  Finn"),  not  a  supreme 
literary  artist  at  all,  but  what  Arnold  Bennett  called 
a  "divine  amateur."  Naturally  this  attempt  to  reveal 
the  clay  in  the  feet  of  one  of  our  national  idols  was 
not  relished  by  the  conventional  reader — it  was  a  bit 
too  disturbing.  For  Mr.  Brooks  did  not  content 
himself  with  a  mere  statement  of  the  fact;  he  care- 
fully went  into  the  causes  underlying  the  fact,  and 
the  chief  of  those  causes  he  found  in  the  American 
environment  of  Mark  Twain's  lifetime,  principally 
the  middle  and  far  West  of  his  youth,  the  stark  and 
ugly  provincialism  of  the  small  towns  of  his  boy- 
hood on  the  Mississippi,  his  mother,  his  friends,  his 
wife,  and  finally  his  children.  Without  any  technical 
jargon,  indeed  without  any  of  the  ordinary  profes- 
sional interest  in  abnormality,  the  book  became  a 
genuine  Freudian  analysis  of  Mark  Twain's  uncon- 
scious motives.  It  was  an  absolutely  novel  and  fresh 
method  of  approach  (Miss  Katherine  Anthony's 
biography  of  Margaret  Fuller  is  a  recent  example 
of  the  application  of  substantially  the  same  method) ; 

25 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

a  pioneer  attempt  to  study  one  of  pur  native  "great" 
men  realistically. 

It  is  hardly  my  purpose  here  to  go  into  an  exposi- 
tion of  the  success  or  failure  of  Mr.  Brooks's  at- 
tempt. The  immediate  reaction  to  the  book  has 
now  about  spent  itself,  and  both  admirers  and  de- 
tractors have  had  their  say.  The  time  has  legiti- 
mately come  for  a  quieter  evaluation:  for  through 
all  the  pros  and  cons  about  Mr.  Brooks's  book  one 
fact  was  never  lost  from  view — the  fact  that  the 
book  was  powerful  and  original,  and  that  its  author 
was  some  one  to  be  reckoned  with.  His  more  recent 
work  on  the  Freeman  (New  York),  of  which  he  is 
literary  editor — principally  under  the  caption  of  "A 
Reviewer's  Note-Book" — has  amply  justified  that 
judgment.  They  reveal  a  critical  mind,  as  the 
"Ordeal"  revealed  it,  detached  and  cool,  scholarly 
and  informed,  almost  French  in  its  clarity  and  finesse, 
sophisticated  without  being  merely  adroit,  and  sym- 
pathetic to  youth  without  being  merely  sentimental. 
They  reveal,  as  the  "Ordeal"  likewise  revealed  them, 
certain  very  intriguing  weaknesses.  I  shall  attempt 
to  sketch  the,  as  William  James  might  term  them, 
tough  and  tender  sides  of  a  critical  faculty  that  has 
genuine  importance  for  American  letters. 

Let  me  begin  by  stating  the  bare  facts.  Van  Wyck 
Brooks  is  a  comparatively  young  man,  a  graduate 
of  Harvard,  the  author  of  more  than  a  half  dozen 
books  of  literary  criticism,  who  has  taught  in  New 
England  and  in  the  far  West  in  universities,  and 
who,  in  addition  to  having  contributed  many  special 
articles  to  various  magazines,  has  at  one  time  or  an- 

26 


VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and  Creator 

other  been  editorially  connected  with  them.  He  was 
one  of  the  editors  of  the  well-known,  if  short-lived, 
"Seven  Arts,"  and  at  present  is  an  associate  editor  of 
the  Freeman  (New  York).  He  has  lived  abroad, 
and  has  lectured  to  a  regular  class  of  English  work- 
ingmen  on  his  usual  topics.  His  sympathies  have 
consistently  been  with  what,  for  want  of  a  better 
term,  we  may  call  the  younger  generation,  and  he  has 
written  a  most  charming  and  illuminating  introduc- 
tion to  a  posthumus  collection  of  essays,  "The  His- 
tory of  a  Literary  Radical,"  by  the  late  Randolph 
Bourne,  of  whom  he  was  a  great  admirer.  Yet  his 
sympathy  with  the  younger  generation  has  never  be- 
trayed him  into  indiscriminate  praise  of  bad  work, 
merely  because  it  was  fresh  and  unusual;  he  has 
never  relaxed  from  judging  by  a  high  criterion.  Nor 
has  his  persistent  conflicts  with  the  ordinary  academic 
mind  blinded  him  to  the  claims  of  careful  scholar- 
ship, as  possibly  a  brief  list  of  his  published  books 
will  suggest:  "America's  Coming  of  Age,"  "The 
World  of  H.  G.  Wells,"  "The  Malady  of  the  Ideal," 
"The  Wine  of  the  Puritans"  (A  Study  of  Present- 
Day  America),  "John  Addington  Symonds"  (A 
Biographical  Study),  "Letters  and  Leadership,"  and 
"The  Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain." 

Such  a  summary  of  course  does  far  less  than  in- 
justice to  its  subject;  these  are  the  more  or  less  acci- 
dental externals  necessary  for  adequate  approach. 
The  right  of  Mr.  Brooks  to  the  attention  of  any  one 
seriously  interested  in  American  intellectual  and  cul- 
tural life  lies,  it  seems  to  me,  in  this:  His  high  pas- 
sion for  the  validity  of  the  claims  of  the  creative  life, 

27 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

his  constant  reiteration  of  the  dignity  of  the  profes- 
sion of  letters,  his  never-tiring  affirmations  of  the 
legitimate  and  important  place  of  art  and  literature 
in  even  our  materially  preoccupied  civilisation.  I 
realise  how  simple  this  sounds,  and  in  an  older  and 
more  wise  civilisation  it  might  sound  even  unimpor- 
tant. But  in  a  civilisation  such  as  ours — still  pioneer, 
still  slightly  embarrassed  at  the  implied  criticism  of 
the  arts,  still  uneasy  in  the  presence  of  those  to  whom 
mere  material  success  literally  means  nothing — the 
function  of  one  who  accepts  the  task  of  this  re- 
affirmation is  neither  simple  nor  unimportant.  Not 
once,  but  a  thousand  times,  not  merely  in  one  review 
of  a  book  or  in  one  critical  article,  but  again  and 
again,  the  critic  of  this  sort  must  remind  us  to  begin 
with  that  the  life  of  the  spirit  is  the  primary  thing — i 
not  amusement,  nor  cleverness,  nor  mere  artistic  in- 
genuity, nor  coating  the  pill  of  moral  exhortation 
with  the  sugar  of  popularity,  but  the  creative  mind. 
It  is  a  discouraging  and  almost  thankless  task,  for  it 
is  the  kind  of  assumption  we  all  too  blithely  accept 
without  troubling  ourselves  about  thinking  it  through. 
One  can  easily  foresee  the  result  of  this  touchstone 
when  applied  to  our  more  popular  novelists;  it  is 
more  disconcerting  when  applied  to  our  more  pre- 
tentious writers  because  it  must  perforce  go  beneath 
sham  and  self-deception.  For  instance,  although 
Mr.  Brooks  resents  as  hotly  as  your  more  naive 
literary  radical,  the  comparative  neglect  given  to 
men,  say,  like  Dreiser  and  Cabell,  he  cannot  content 
himself  with  merely  tooting  their  horn;  precisely  be- 
cause they  do  make  serious  pretensions,  he  judges 

28 


VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and  Creator 

them  seriously,  i.  e.,  by  European  standards,  with 
results  not  altogether  complimentary.  Yet  the  con- 
ventional disparager  of  either  of  these  men  will  find 
small  comfort  in  Mr.  Brooks's  severe  appraisements; 
he  does  not  condemn  them  because  they  abandon 
certain  American  standards,  but  because,  having 
abandoned  them,  they  did  not  do  so  fully  or  artis- 
tically. The  practical  difference  is  immense.  And 
combined  with  this  high  passion  for  the  claims  of  the 
creative  life  Mr.  Brooks  possesses  infinite  verbal 
felicity,  sharp  psychological  insight,  true  simplicity 
of  approach,  and  wide  scholarship — surely  no  mean 
equipment  for  any  critic ! 

One  would  not  have  to  make  any  serious  reserva- 
tions to  this  judgment,  yet  four  important  defects, 
which  impair  the  easy  functioning  of  his  admitted 
gift,  ought  to  be  noted.  The  first  is  the  most  inter- 
esting, and  can  be  best  explained  by  an  analogy. 

When  certain  critics  complained  that  Nietzsche's 
fulminations  against  aspects  of  Christianity — par- 
ticularly against  charity  and  humility — arose  because 
he  was  lacking  himself  in  those  emotions,  and  could 
therefore  not  adequately  appreciate  their  value, 
Nietzsche  wrote  to  his  sister  in  defence  that,  on  the 
contrary,  he  hated  these  virtues  not  because  he  had 
not  himself  experienced  them  but  because  he  had 
experienced  them  to  excess  and  knew  their  danger. 
Similarly,  Mr.  Brooks  is  a  part  of  the  tradition  he 
repudiates;  he  cannot  quite  escape  being  somewhat 
academic  in  his  attacks  on  academicism.  Unlike  a 
rough  and  tumble  critic  such  as  Mr.  H.  L.  Mencken, 
to  whom  the  whole  academic  tradition  is  external, 

29 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

something  to  be  amused  at  or  have  fun  with  but  not 
to  take  any  more  seriously  than  an  annoying  fly  on  a 
hot  summer's  day,  Mr.  Brooks  has  to  fight  the  battle 
within  himself  almost  every  time  he  writes.  He 
repudiates  the  academic  tradition  through  internal 
conflict  rather  than  external  contempt;  he  cannot  be 
quite  objective  about  it.  Particularly  does  this  reveal 
itself  in  an  occasional  shrinking  quality  to  his  style, 
somewhat  like  Matthew  Arnold  writing  at  his  worst. 
This  faint  aura  of  old-fashioned  gentility,  which 
seems  to  cling  to  certain  portions  of  Mr.  Brooks's 
writings,  this  curious  lack  of  gusto  and  heartiness, 
really  springs  from  a  sort  of  asceticism,  expressing 
itself  in  reiterative  preoccupation  with  the  claims  of 
the  creative  life.  It  is  a  fine  theme,  but  Mr.  Brooks 
plays  on  it  a  little  too  constantly;  he  cannot  seem  to 
forget  it  for  moments  long  enough  to  permit  sensu- 
ous enjoyment  of  the  things  of  the  flesh  and  the  devil, 
as,  for  example,  with  that  finest  of  ironists,  Anatole 
France,  one  feels  that  the  logic  of  ideas  may  always 
be  spiced  with  frank  appreciation  of  fair  women,  old 
wine,  and  a  good  table.  Mr.  Brooks  is  a  trifle  too 
serious  to  be  a  great  ironist,  and  particularly  in  his 
"Ordeal  of  Mark  Twain"  this  almost  evangelistic 
fervour  to  underscore  the  main  theme  has  evoked 
from  many  critics  the  charge — although  I  believe,  on 
the  whole,  it  is  not  a  wholly  just  one — of  something 
of  a  lack  of  sense  of  humour.  It  all  goes  back,  it 
seems  to  me,  to  a  delicate  sensitiveness,  a  detach- 
ment, cool  and  well-nigh  impeccable  from  an  intel- 
lectual* point  of  view,  but  not  warmed  sufficiently 
with  direct  experience.     It  is  sensibility  moving  in  a 

30 


VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and  Creator 

rather  rarefied  atmosphere  of  ideas  and  subtle  emo- 
tions, explaining,  too,  his  constant  fear  that  our 
younger  writers  will  be  drawn  away  from  the  true 
spirit  of  culture  into  the  more  or  less  irrelevant 
vortex  of  politics  and  sociology.  For  example,  Ran- 
dolph Bourne  in  the  ''History  of  a  Literary  Radical" 
spoke  of  living  down  "the  new  orthodoxies  of  propa- 
ganda" as  he  had  lived  down  the  old  orthodoxies  of 
the  classics,  and  in  his  introduction  to  that  book  Mr. 
Brooks  interprets  that  to  mean  that  had  Bourne 
lived,  his  interests  would  have  "concentrated  more 
and  more  on  the  problem  of  evoking  and  shaping  an 
American  literature" — an  interpretation  that  I  think 
clearly  incorrect.  Still,  whether  correct  or  not,  it  is 
an  illustration  which  serves  as  an  excellent  index  to 
this  aspect  of  Mr.  Brooks's  point  of  view.  He 
shrinks  a  little  from  the  practical  world,  as  if  it  were 
in  a  kind  of  malign  collective  conspiracy  to  destroy 
one's  interest  in  the  true  things  of  the  spirit — 
whereas  the  fact  probably  is,  it  is  in  no  conspiracy  at 
all,  but  merely  sodden  and  indifferent,  fully  preoccu- 
pied with  the  economic  difficulty  of  living.  The 
young  writer  of  to-day  cannot  escape  this  soddenness 
and  indifference ;  it  is  almost  imperative  he  have  some 
central  conviction  as  to  how  this  economic  difficulty 
can  be  solved  so  that  creative  energies  may  be  set 
free.  He  does  not  have  to  be  a  conscious  propa- 
gandist for  this  conviction,  quite  the  contrary;  but 
he  must  have  it  as  a  background  to  his  mind  so  that 
the  world  becomes,  so  to  speak,  spiritually  tolerable 
and  his  creative  instincts  may  function  without  let  or 
hindrance.     It  is  a  penalty  all  writers  have  to  pay 

3i 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

for  living  in  this  age — that  is,  a  penalty  they  must 
pay  if  they  expect  to  be  heard  and  to  exercise  any 
genuine  influence.  Mr.  Brooks  does  not  like  to  face 
this  difficulty  squarely;  he  shudders  a  bit  at  economics 
instead  of  recognizing  the  imperative  need  of  human- 
ising it. 

Perhaps  a  deeper  defect  is  Mr.  Brooks's  lack  of 
some  central  philosophy  of  life,  some  definite  Welt- 
anschauung. At  some  times  he  writes  like  a  con- 
vinced free-willist;  he  challenges  authors  because  they 
do  not  properly  see  their  role  of  leadership,  implying 
that  a  handful  of  creative  minds,  set  free  and  disin- 
terested, may  change  the  whole  drift  and  colour  of  a 
civilisation — as  certainly  such  handfuls  seem  to  have 
done  often  enough  in  the  past.  At  other  times  he 
writes  like  a  convinced  determinist;  he  explains  the 
weaknesses  of  authors  in  terms  of  their  environment, 
implying  as  plainly  that  unless  there  is  a  collective 
tradition,  a  way  of  life,  an  objective  culture  furnish- 
ing clear  standards  of  discrimination,  authors  must 
necessarily  be  crippled  and  thwarted — as  certainly 
such  maladjusted  authors  seem  to  have  been  so  crip- 
pled often  enough  in  the  past.  Yet  both  points  of 
view  cannot  be  absolutely  true ;  they  are  fundamen- 
tally incompatible.  Nevertheless  Mr.  Brooks  seems 
unable  to  effect  any  reconciliation  between  them,  with 
the  result  that  often  in  his  writings  there  is  an  odd 
effect  of  internal  vacillation — that  is,  intellectually. 
But  Mr.  Brooks  is  still  a  young  man;  there  is  nothing 
irremediable  in  this,  and  I  prefer  to  regard  it  simply 
as  an  indication  that  Mr.  Brooks  has  not  yet  reached 
his  full  intellectual  maturity.    After  all,  one  remem- 

32 


VAN  WYCK  BROOKS:  Critic  and  Creator 

bers  that  William  James  did  not  publish  his  first 
book  until  he  was  forty-eight. 

Mr.  Brooks's  reception  by  other  American  critics 
has  been,  on  the  whole,  encouraging  as  appreciation, 
but  discouraging  as  guidance.  His  power  and  equip- 
ment have  been  recognised  and  welcomed.  Certain 
academic  critics — men  like  Stuart  P.  Sherman — have 
attacked  him,  as  might  naturally  have  been  expected, 
although  usually,  I  think,  for  the  wrong  reason.  In 
any  event,  his  reception  has  not  been  personally  help- 
ful to  him — I  mean  by  that  that  he  has  not  been  able 
to  evoke  any  considerable  body  of  intelligent  criti- 
cism which  would  help  him  to  correct  his  faults. 
Possibly  such  a  body  of  intelligent  criticism  is  not  to 
be  found  in  America  to-day;  there  assuredly  seems  to 
be  no  standard  to  which  the  young  writer,  wise  or 
foolish,  good  or  bad,  may  repair  with  some  confi- 
dence. There  is  most  certainly  no  body  of  tradition 
to  reflect  the  judgment  of  his  peers. 

It  is  precisely  the  chief  function  of  Mr.  Brooks 
to  contribute  towards  the  creation  of  those  institu- 
tional lacks  in  our  environment.  He  can  hardly  fail 
to  help  in  that  creation,  if  only  by  virtue  of  his  call- 
ing such  insistent  attention  to  those  things  in  Amer- 
ica— if  they  are  ever  to  be  built  at  all — which  he 
himself  missed,  and  thus,  vicariously,  missed  for 
others. 


33 


A  STUDY  in  DOCILITY 

The  articles  on  America  and  Americans  by  Mr. 
Henry  W.  Nevinson,  which  have  appeared  originally 
in  the  London  Nation  and  the  Manchester  Guardian 
and  have  subsequently  been  reprinted  in  some  of  our 
newspapers  and  magazines,  are  both  illuminating  and 
good-tempered — a  grateful  combination,  for  it  must 
be  really  difficult  for  the  intelligent  and  perceiving 
foreigner  to  survey  our  contemporary  civilisation 
without  becoming  angry.  But  Mr.  Nevinson,  with 
an  alert  eye  for  our  weaknesses,  contrives  to  keep 
urbane  and  well-disposed.  It  is  easy  to  see  that  the 
author  has  had  many  of  his  pre-conceptions  destroyed 
by  the  facts  of  our  life  as  he  saw  them,  some  pre- 
conceptions quite  amiable  and  others  obviously  less 
so.  He  seems  frankly  surprised  and  pleased  at  our 
inveterate  good-nature  and  easy-going  ways — sur- 
prised, also,  although  not  so  pleasantly,  at  our  ter- 
ror of  public  opinion  and  docility  before  the  ukases 
of  our  irresponsible  government.  He  finds  it  diffi- 
cult to  understand  the  fetish  we  make  of  our  anti- 
quated Constitution,  and  our  deep  fear  of  any  funda- 
mental change.  We  do  not  challenge  authority,  he 
says;  we  accept  it  in  any  of  its  forms  with  almost 
child-like  patience;  a  heritage,  he  suspects,  from  the 
severity  of  our  Puritan  forebears.  For  the  most  part 
Mr.  Nevinson's  observations  are  just  and  shrewd,  if 

34 


A  STUDY  in  DOCILITY 

also,  in  our  opinion,  a  trifle  too  kindly  and  tolerant; 
and  we  can  with  a  clear  conscience  recommend  a 
reading  of  them  to  all  who  wish  to  know  the  cultured 
outsider's  reaction  to  our  contemporary  American 
social  life. 

But  the  explanation  Mr.  Nevinson  makes  of  our 
docility,  while  true  enough  as  far  as  it  goes,  seems  to 
us  somewhat  inadequate.  Further,  it  is  only  one  side 
of  the  medal,  so  to  speak,  for  our  docility,  undoubt- 
edly our  worst  fault,  is  the  inevitable  accompaniment 
of  our  lack  of  class-consciousness  or  caste-feeling, 
which,  in  its  turn,  is  unquestionably  our  greatest 
strength.  Now  this  lack  of  class-consciousness  is 
derived  not  so  much  from  Puritanism  per  se  as  from 
the  whole  pioneer  tradition.  Social  distinctions  can 
not  in  a  pioneer  country  have  the  rigidity  or  impor- 
tance they  invariably  have  in  any  old  and  long-settled 
country.  When  every  one  was  engaged  in  the  great 
adventure  of  exploiting  the  natural  resources  of  a 
virgin  continent,  when  economic  opportunity  lay  to 
anybody's  properly  acquisitive  hand;  when  for  many 
years  the  fact — and  not  the  myth,  as  it  is  to-day — of 
free  land  created  an  almost  irresistible  Drang  nach 
Westen;  when  a  fortune  could  still  be  made  and  lost 
in  a  week;  when  capital  was  fluid  rather  than  con- 
centrated; when  finance  and  business  had  more  the 
aspects  of  a  game  than  a  serious  profession — with 
such  a  pioneer  background,  many  aspects  of  it  con- 
tinuing even  to  this  day,  social  distinctions  are  felt  as 
rather  absurd  and  a  definite  caste  system  becomes 
next  to  impossible; 

It  is  in  this  respect  that  one  feels  most  deeply 

35 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

American  when  abroad;  we  always  resent  the  servile 
"sir"  of  the  English  "man"  and  find  it  difficult  not 
to  cry  out  in  rage  when  foreign  taxi-drivers  or  lug- 
gage men  doff  their  caps  out  of,  if  not  real  respect, 
at  all  events  immemorial  tradition.  The  spontane- 
ous sense  of  equality  of  the  blaspheming  American 
baggage-smasher  appears  healthy  and  genuinely  dem- 
ocratic by  comparison.  In  fact,  our  hatred  of  ser- 
vility in  any  of  its  forms  is  one  of  the  deepest  of 
our  national  feelings;  we  really  do  believe  that  one 
man  is  just  as  good  as  another — if  not  a  little  bit 
better. 

But  this  is  not  ten  per  cent  the  outcome  of  Puri- 
tanism; it  is  the  equality  of  the  pioneer,  or  in  modern 
terms  the  entrepreneur,  to  become  which,  if  one 
wishes,  is  still  regarded  as  every  native  American's 
inalienable  right.  It  is  not  an  especially  ennobling 
type  of  equality,  to  be  sure;  it  is  rather  the  type  of 
equality  that  states  that  every  little  pig  shall  have 
his  equal  chance  at  the  swill-trough  of  national  pros- 
perity. Yet  whatever  its  materialistic  origins,  it  has 
resulted  in  a  very  definite  emotional  attitude,  an  al- 
most complete  absence  of  anything  like  class-con- 
sciousness. This  is  the  real  and  fundamental  reason 
why  the  Socialist  party  in  America  remains  essentially 
alien  in  its  point  of  view,  and  has  never  adapted  it- 
self successfully  to  native  psychological  conditions. 
Temperamentally  we  dislike  uniforms,  rank,  titles, 
medals,  and  all  other  badges  of  distinction  and  dif- 
ference; which  has  resulted,  as  all  foreign  observers 
have  pointed  out,  in  an  incredible  uniformity  of  dress 
and  speech  and  mannerism,  a  standardisation  fitting 

36 


A  STUDY  in  DOCILITY 

in  extremely  well  with  modern  industrial  methods, 
national  advertising,  and  large-scale  production. 

To  put  it  in  a  nutshell,  the  docility  which  Mr. 
Nevinson  justly  and  correctly  deplores  is  the  price 
we  pay  for  a  real  democratic  equality.  When  dis- 
tinction of  any  kind,  even  intellectual  distinction,  is 
somehow  resented  as  a  betrayal  of  the  American 
spirit  of  equal  opportunity  for  all,  the  result  must 
be  just  this  terror  of  individualistic  impulses  setting 
us  apart,  either  above  or  below  our  neighbours;  just 
this  determination  to  obey  without  questioning  and 
to  subscribe  with  passion  to  the  conventions  and 
traditions.  The  dilemma  becomes  a  very  real  one: 
How  can  this  sense  of  democratic  equality  be  made 
compatible  with  respect  for  exceptional  personali- 
ties or  great  minds?  How  can  democracy,  as  we 
understand  it  to-day,  with  its  iron  repression  of  the 
free  spirit,  its  monotonous  standardisation  of  every- 
thing, learn  to  cherish  an  intellectual  aristocracy 
without  which  any  nation  runs  the  risk  of  becoming 
a  civilisation  of  the  commonplace  and  the  second- 
rate? 

American  docility  is  the  natural  result  of  the  pio- 
neering background  of  our  history,  just  as  European 
servility  is  the  natural  result  of  that  continent's  feudal 
background.  In  the  first  instance,  our  terror  before 
what  is  called  public  opinion  and  our  fear  that  we 
shall  be  found  out  transgressing  the  accepted  moral 
standards,  has  its  compensation  in  the  absence  of 
any  bowing-down  before  mere  caste.  In  the  second 
instance,  the  intense  class-consciousness  in  a  country 
like  England  has  its  compensation  in  the  presence  of 

37 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

an  intellectual  aristocracy  that  does  not  hesitate  to 
view  middle-class  morality  and  middle-class  ideals 
with  contempt.  Whichever  view  prevails,  there  are 
advantages  and  disadvantages.  Is  it  possible  to 
reconcile  the  advantages  and  at  the  same  time  avoid 
the  evils  which  look  like  the  necessary  correlative  of 
adopting  either  point  of  view? 

The  history  of  American  democracy  during  the 
last  ten  years  does  not  seem  to  point  to  an  affirmative 
answer  to  that  question;  to  tell  the  truth,  to  find  an 
answer  to  the  riddle  appears  too  much  like  discov- 
ering how  to  eat  one's  cake  and  have  it  too,  a  discov- 
ery not  yet  made  although  mankind  rather  obsti- 
nately refuses  to  give  up  hope.  For  is  it  not  really 
an  open  question  whether  we  have  not  abandoned 
our  terror  of  mere  caste  only  to  replace  it  with  an 
even  fiercer  terror  of  that  democratic  leviathan,  The 
Average  Man?  Have  we  not  refused  to  bow  down 
to  noble  blood,  only  that  we  may  bow  down  in  even 
more  lowly  fashion  to  the  average  man  and  his 
commonplace  prejudices? 

Certainly  any  thoughtful  student  of  the  course  of 
social  history  in  democratic  America  would  hesitate 
to  answer  these  questions  in  the  negative.  We  have 
witnessed  a  steady  increase  in  the  glorification  of  the 
average;  the  average  in  health,  in  morals,  in  intel- 
lect. Our  strongest  passion  seems  to  have  become 
more  and  more  the  passion  to  be  as  closely  as  possible 
like  every  one  else.  From  the  point  of  view  of  hu- 
man personality,  we  have  literally  become  afraid  to 
go  home  in  the  dark.  This  increasing  standardisa- 
tion is  no  mere  accident;  it  is  part  of  the  normal  de- 

38 


A  STUDY  in  DOCILITY 

velopment  of  our  type  of  democracy,  at  least  up  to 
the  saturation-point.  At  present,  our  most  logical 
hope  can  only  be  that  this  saturation-point  has  been 
almost,  if  not  fully,  reached.  We  shall  but  be  hug- 
ging illusions,  if  we  imagine  that  any  great  literary 
or  artistic  movement  will  be  possible  in  America 
until  the  present  ideals  of  democratic  equality  have 
been  re-examined  and  re-evaluated. 


39 


LA  PEUR  de  la  VIE 

It  is  curious  what  different  types  of  mind  and  what 
different  methods  of  intellectual  approach  have  pro- 
duced an  almost  identical  diagnosis  of  the  anaemia 
of  modern  industrial  civilisation.  Long  before  the 
present  world  war  William  James,  in  his  now  pro- 
phetic essay  "A  Moral  Equivalent  for  War,"  ex- 
pressed the  criticism  of  the  alert  and  discerning  mind 
at  the  thinness  and  barrenness  of  a  universe  con- 
structed from  merely  well-intentioned  humanitarian 
ideals.  To  a  man  of  such  vigour  and  real  daring  a 
world  of  placid  utopianism  was  intolerable.  James's 
whole  essay  was  a  straightforward  attempt  to  assess 
the  high  value  of  danger  and  risk  in  any  endurable 
society.  Yet  so  utterly  unlike  a  temperament  as  that 
represented  by  George  Santayana  made  a  similar 
complaint  in  "Winds  of  Doctrine,"  saying  with  great 
bitterness  that  nothing  was  meaner  and  more  con- 
temptible than  the  desire  to  live  on,  somehow,  at 
any  price — a  desire  which  seemed  to  be  the  chief 
characteristic,  and  to  further  which  was  the  main 
intellectual  preoccupation,  of  the  age.  Even  in  so 
unphilosophical  and  essentially  journalistic  and  con- 
temporary a  writer  as  H.  G.  Wells  there  often  re- 
curred this  same  bitterness  at  the  lack  of  colour  and 
movement  in  modern  life,  where,  as  he  once  ex- 
pressed it,  a  man  could  live  through  his  entire  three 
score  years  and  ten  fudging  and  evading1  and  never 

40 


LA  PEUR  de  la  VIE 

being  really  hungry,  never  being  really  thirsty  or 
angry  or  in  danger,  or  facing  a  really  great  emotion, 
until  the  agony  of  the  deathbed.  Civilisation  had 
not  merely  refused  to  calculate  on  death,  but  had 
come  almost  to  the  point  of  refusing  to  believe  in  it. 
The  keener  minds  rebelled  against  that  hypocrisy. 
Then  came  the  war,  and  with  it  that  most  discon- 
certing phenomenon  which  L.  P.  Jacks  has  described 
as  "the  peacefulness  of  being  at  war" — the  sense,  at 
last,  that  there  was  really  danger  and  high  adventure 
and  the  possibility  of  dealing  and  receiving  death 
once  more.  Of  course  the  conventional  reformist 
type  of  mind  was  shocked  and  horrified  at  this 
emergence  of  death  as  a  reality.  Up  to  what  we 
might  call  the  saturation  point  of  sensitiveness  these 
minds  dwelt  with  almost  unctuous  detail  upon  blood, 
pus,  agony,  and  human  hopes  shattered  to  bits  by 
unfeeling  fire  and  shrapnel.  These  were  the  people 
who  during  the  first  year  of  the  war  never  tired  of 
telling  us  that  civilisation  had  tumbled  into  ruins. 
But  as  they  had  never  really  faced  death  before  the 
war  came,  so  they  never  really  faced  it  afterward. 
Their  shrinking  from  war's  horrors  was  not  sincere; 
they  protested  too  much.  Unlike  the  average  soldier, 
dragged  from  an  industrial  life  of  doubtful  happi- 
ness, thwarted  in  his  aspirations  for  creative  activ- 
ity, crushed  in  his  few  timid  strivings  for  genuine 
emotions,  bound  by  routine,  they  did  not  accept  the 
war  as  a  kind  of  release  from  the  diligent  muffling 
against  the  realities  of  life  and  death  which  we  call 
modern  civilisation.  In  all  men  in  whose  veins  blood 
has  not  wholly  turned  to  water  there  is  left  a  strong 

41 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

instinct  of  what  the  French  call  nostalgie  de  la 
boue,  and  while  they  do  not  pretend  to  like  lice 
and  mud  and  sudden  pain  and  hunger  and  cold  and 
an  iron  discipline  that  reduces  their  own  individuality 
to  zero,  it  would  be  idle  to  deny  that  they  find  in 
all  these  things  a  kind  of  deep  gratification  (a  grati- 
fication which  the  conventional  pacifist  mind  cannot 
even  imaginatively  appreciate)  that  life  is  not  the 
smooth,  round,  tasteless  monotony  which  the  indus- 
trial revolution  had  almost  succeeded  in  making  it. 
Naturally  soldiers  do  not  intellectualise  about 
war  in  the  ingenious  fashion  of  Mr.  Jacks,  and  for 
them  its  glamour  has  little  connection  with  the  trap- 
pings and  parade  and  music  of  militaristic  romance. 
What  is  undeniable,  however,  is  that  war,  in  so  far 
as  it  is  a  war  and  not  a  corporation-like  mechanism, 
does  satisfy  a  fundamental  and  thwarted  human 
need.  This  is  either  ignored  or  denied  by  the  con- 
ventional humanitarian  mind,  which  suddenly  in 
August,  19 14,  discovered  that  war  was  horrible  and 
men  were  the  sons  of  women.  And  as  a  consequence 
this  type  of  reformist  intellectual  approach — by  far 
the  most  common — after  its  first  shattering  of  amia- 
ble illusions  developed  a  curious  technique  of  evasion, 
which  is  precisely  as  much  a  denial  of  the  reality 
of  death  in  actual  war  time  as  it  was  formerly  in  the 
piping  days  of  peace.  Details  are  not  here  neces- 
sary, for  we  all  recognise  those  for  whom  to-day 
the  emphasis  is  all  upon  the  happy  by-products  of 
the  present  agony,  the  new  world,  integration,  and 
so  on.  Indeed,  instead  of  being  shocked  by  war  out 
of  their  earlier  paltry  utopianism  to  face  and  to  cal- 

42 


LA  PEUR  de  la  VIE 

culate  upon  the  reality  of  death  in  life,  the  last  four 
years  seem  merely  to  have  made  them  take  refuge 
in  even  more  grandiose  utopianisms.  Too  many  of 
the  schemes  for  a  reconstructed  world  after  the  war 
are  merely  self-protective  prisons  in  which  the  well- 
wishers  defend  themselves  from  the  assaults  of  the 
awful  reality  beating  at  their  doors. 

But  the  competent  and  realistic  mind  is  not  afraid 
either  to  face  the  possibility  of  death  or  to  describe 
modern  war  in  any  other  terms  than  those  of  per- 
manent human  values.  It  does  not  shrink  from  a 
world  of  danger  and  struggle,  yet  neither  does  it 
gloss  over  or  prettify  the  tragic  fruits  of  the  modern 
battlefield.  Bertrand  Russell  is  a  signal  example  of 
the  humanist  and  realist  who  strikes  this  compromise 
between  a  recognition  of  the  necessity  for  danger 
and  colour  and  creation  and  movement  in  a  decent 
civilisation,  and  a  recognition  of  the  futility  and 
waste  of  modern  war.  He  realises,  as  Gilbert  Can- 
nan  in  his  passionate  little  book  "Freedom"  also 
realises,  that  modern  wars  are  the  atonement  we 
make  for  our  lack  of  appreciating  the  human  evils 
of  a  pallid,  "safe"  industrialism.  On  the  other  side 
of  the  enemy  frontier,  Professor  Sigmund  Freud 
voices  much  the  same  idea  in  his  short  essay,  "Re- 
flections on  War  and  Death,"  for  the  translation  of 
which  we  have  to  thank  the  diligence  and  scientific 
interest  of  Dr.  A.  A.  Brill  and  Mr.  A.  B.  Kuttner. 
It  is  true  that  Dr.  Freud's  final  plea  has  not  entirely 
the  hopeful  and  prophetic  quality  of  Bertrand  Rus- 
sell's vision.  Evidently  the  essay  was  written  early 
in  the  war,  for  it  is  spotty  and  unco-ordinated  and 

43 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

slight.  Freud  has  not  attempted  to  deal  with  the 
second  and  less  cynical  part  of  the  dilemma  of 
modern  war  as  definitely  and  optimistically  as  Rus- 
sell. But  he  has  stated  afresh  with  great  vigour,  and 
with  the  powerful  reinforcement  of  his  well-known 
technique  of  psychological  analysis,  the  barrenness 
of  modern  civilisation — a  barrenness  which  arose 
from  its  refusal  to  calculate  upon  death. 

"Life  becomes  impoverished  and  loses  its  inter- 
est when  life  itself,  the  highest  stake  in  the  game 
of  living,  must  not  be  risked."  In  ordinary,  every- 
day existence  we  can  get  only  the  thin  gratification 
of  our  ever-dying,  ever-resurrected  heroes  of  litera- 
ture and  the  stage.  All  our  risks  and  our  challenges 
of  fate  are  vicarious.  Thus  we  are  inconsolable  when 
death  actually  happens,  and  we  act  "as  if  we  belonged 
to  the  tribe  of  the  Asra,  who  also  die  when  those 
whom  they  love  perish."  As  Freud  points  out,  war 
compels  us  to  change  all  that — to  recognise  the  real- 
ity of  death,  just  as  the  death  of  the  beloved  of 
primitive  man  (who,  like  our  own  unconscious  to-day, 
did  not  believe  in  death)  forced  him  to  recognise 
its  reality.  For  war  restores  what  civilisation  can 
hide,  heroism  which  springs  from  our  deep  inability 
to  believe  in  our  own  death,  pleasure  in  the  killing 
of  the  hated  one  in  the  enemy  (the  hatred  which  is 
the  component  of  all  love),  and  power  to  rise  above 
"the  shock  of  the  death  of  friends."  Freud  asks 
us  if  we  have  not,  in  our  civilised  attitude  towards 
death,  lived  psychologically  beyond  our  means.  His 
own  answer  of  course  is  in  the  affirmative,  and  the 
affirmative  is  probably  correct.    He  is  certainly  right 

44 


LA  PEUR  de  la  VIE 

in  urging  us  to  shake  off  our  hypocrisy  about  death 
and  to  calculate  upon  its  realities.  But  it  is  a  plea 
which  is  relevant  for  peace  as  for  war.  Whatever 
civilisation  emerges  from  the  recent  clash  of  arms, 
it  can  have  no  stability  and  no  creative  joy  unless 
our  former  timidities  are  exorcised.  Life  loses  its 
major  virility  when  we  strive  at  all  costs  to  maintain 
it.  That  is  the  justification  for  Freud's  plea,  and 
it  is  sufficient. 


45 


WHERE  Are  Our 
INTELLECTUALS? 

What  is  the  matter  with  the  American  intellec- 
tuals? If  they  really  occupy  the  valid  position  of 
mediating  between  extremes,  the  alternate  attacks  of 
the  conservatives  who  hint  that  they  are  insidious, 
and  of  the  extremists  of  the  other  end  who  call  them 
timid  and  time-serving,  ought  to  flatter  them  tremen- 
dously; for  they  are  always  being  attacked  in  just 
this  fashion.  On  the  Sunday  following  the  explosion 
in  Wall  Street,  the  Reverend  Dr.  Manning,  of  Trin- 
ity Church,  at  the  head  of  Wall  Street,  preached  a 
few  words  of  warning  against  them;  and  every  issue 
of  your  downright  "red"  periodical  has  at  least  one 
contemptuous  fling  at  them.  Yet  somehow  the  care- 
ful observer  comes  to  feel  both  charges  as  unreal; 
the  intellectuals  are  not  so  much  faint-hearted  as 
they  are  bewildered,  and  they  can  hardly  be  called 
insidious  in  their  influence,  when  the  fact  is  that  they 
exercise  practically  no  influence  at  all.  The  trouble 
goes  much  deeper. 

First  of  all,  as  is  true  of  all  other  countries,  they 
are  numerically  an  extremely  small  class.  By  com- 
mon consent,  they  are  not  the  college  and  university 
professors  occupying  official  positions.  These  pro- 
fessors may  sympathise  with  certain  phases  of  their 
activity,  in  fact,  they  often  do  so;  but  it  is  a  sound 
intuition  that  puts  them  outside  the  class.     It  is  felt 

46 


WHERE  Are  Our  INTELLECTUALS? 

that  by  the  terms  of  their  official  position  itself  they 
have  given  hostages  to  fate:  they  are  committed. 
And  the  intellectuals'  ideal — the  correct  and  fine  one, 
too — is  that  first  and  foremost  the  intellectual  must 
be  disinterested,  non-sectarian  and  non-partisan,  de- 
voted to  no  pursuit  except  pursuit  of  the  truth.  Offi- 
cial educators  are  not  easily  thought  of  as  in  this 
group;  only  occasionally  can  the  man  of  genius  like 
William  James,  rise  above  his  professorial  identifi- 
cations. Similarly,  although  the  man  of  science  might 
be  thought  to  be  the  natural  leader  or  certainly  the 
first  member  of  the  intellectual  class,  science  has 
been  cut  up  into  too  many  unrelated  specialisms. 
Once  more  the  intellectuals'  ideal — and  once  more 
the  correct  and  fine  one — is  that  the  truth  in  question 
is  not  any  narrow  one  of  method  or  of  limited  and 
precise  observation,  but  the  truth  of  the  whole  range 
of  life.  It  is  the  philosopher's  point  of  view;  what 
to-day  we  call  the  humanistic  view.  Only  occasion- 
ally can  a  man  of  genius  like  Huxley  or  Agassiz,  tran- 
scend his  special  sphere,  and  attain  it.  No,  the  term 
intellectuals,  has  come  to  mean  something  both 
broader  and  narrower;  publicists,  editors  of  non- 
trade  magazines,  pamphleteers,  writers  on  general 
topics.  In  France  they  are  represented  by  such  men 
as  Henri  Barbusse,  Anatole  France,  and  Romain 
Rolland;  in  England,  say,  by  Shaw,  Wells,  Chester- 
ton, Angell,  Massingham,  Scott,  Brailsford,  Wallas 
and  Cole;  in  America — by  such  as  the  reader  may 
nominate. 

It  is  true,  then,  that  the  class  is  a  small  one.    Per- 
haps for  that  reason  it  might  naturally  be  expected 

47 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

not  to  have  much  influence;  and  in  this  country  there 
is  a  certain  excuse  for  its  impotence,  in  the  fact  that 
minorities  are  more  despised  here  than  in  any  other 
country.  Well  and  good;  but  the  same  class  is  small 
in  all  countries,  as  we  have  already  said,  and  even  if 
other  nations  are  more  tolerant  in  such  matters,  it  is 
never  in  the  nature  of  things  for  a  minority  to  be 
popular.  Yet  the  fact  remains  that  in  France  and 
England  this  group  has  exercised,  and  is  exercising 
to-day,  enormous  influence;  it  is  also  the  fact  that  in 
America  to-day  it  is  exercising  no  influence  at  all. 
Differences  in  social  structure  can  explain  a  good 
deal,  but  not  everything.  There  are  deep  internal 
weaknesses  in  the  position  of  the  American  intellec- 
tual. 

In  our  brief  definition  of  the  ideals  which  the  in- 
tellectual attempts  to  represent,  we  come  upon  our 
chief  clue  to  these  weaknesses.  The  American  intel- 
lectual is  primarily  not  disinterested;  second,  he  has 
kept  his  attention  upon  an  extremely  narrow  range  of 
subjects,  politics  above  all — which  perhaps  is  to  be 
expected  in  a  country  where  politics,  in  spite  of  its 
accomplishing  so  little,  is  so  much  the  topic  of  com- 
mon conversation,  so  much  the  reformer's  instrument 
— and  then,  after  politics  (although  in  a  curiously 
faint-hearted  manner,  as  if  only  in  answer  to  the 
persistent  attacks  of  the  radicals)  economics.  A  few, 
by  force  of  a  curious  cultural  atavism,  apparently, 
are  interested  in  certain  derivatives  of  religion;  a 
larger  number  take  a  lively  interest  in  literature  and 
art  and  philosophy;  although  in  the  last  instance,  of- 
tenest  with  contempt  for  those  who  devote  over-much 

48 


WHERE  Are  Our  INTELLECTUALS? 

of  their  energy  to  economic  and  political  subjects. 
But  one  can  count  on  the  fingers  of  one  hand  those 
who,  like  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  in  England,  are  flex- 
ible enough  and  unafraid  to  take  for  their  province 
the  whole  diverse  range  of  contemporary  American 
social  life.  This  almost  instinctive  limitation  of  in- 
terest is  both  the  result  and  the  cause  of  a  kind 
of  partisanship,  the  bias  which  inevitably  comes 
from  too  close  preoccupation  with  one  subject;  exem- 
plified most  drearily  in  the  myth  of  the  Ph.  D.  As 
a  cause  of  this  partisanship,  it  is  linked  up  with  what 
we  ventured  to  term  the  primary  weakness  of  the 
American  intellectual — his  almost  complete  lack  of 
disinterestedness. 

This  primary  weakness  can  best  be  seen  as  the 
consequence  of  a  far  and  an  immediate  historical 
tradition,  a  cultural  driving  force  in  American  life 
long  antedating  the  war,  and  powerfully  reinforced 
by  it.  It  is,  in  brief,  the  tradition  of  getting  things 
done,  of  definite  accomplishment.  That  is  why  so 
many  young  Americans  start  out  to  become  intellec- 
tuals, disinterested  lovers  of  the  truth,  and  end  up 
by  becoming  reformers.  The  natural  temper  of  the 
country  is  horribly  evangelical,  and  it  is  only  by  try- 
ing to  get  some  new  idea  or  reform  "across,"  that 
the  intellectual  comes  to  feel  that  he  has  a  respectable 
place  in  our  contemporary  social  life.  When  thought 
is  despised  and  feared,  one  must  make  action  and 
verbiage  do  duty  for  thought;  one  must  "show  re- 
sults." The  pitiful  breakdown  of  American  intel- 
lectuals under  the  pressure  of  war-hysteria  can  be 
traced  to  the  working  of  this  immemorial  national 

49 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

tradition.  To  stand  outside  the  current  of  events  in 
splendid  isolation,  like  Randolph  Bourne,  was  felt 
to  be  both  erratic  and  snobbish,  and  also  ineffective; 
that  was  the  crushing  argument,  ineffective.  Every 
intellectual  prided  himself  on  being  pragmatic,  and 
bristled  with  indignation  at  the  ultimate  sceptic  of 
any  of  the  values  supposedly  involved  in  "winning 
the  war."  It  would  have  been  utterly  alien  to  Amer- 
ican temperament,  something  incredible  to  conceive, 
that  any  party  should  have  arisen  in  America — such 
a  party  as  did  arise  in  Russia  in  191 6  and  early  19 17 
— advocating  the  idea  that  true  national  salvation 
lay  in  defeat  rather  than  victory.  The  very  Russian 
word  podvig  is  almost  untranslatable.  We  make  a 
religion  of  optimism,  of  activity,  of  getting  things 
done  and  always  for  the  better.  It  is  against  this 
metallic  social  environment  that  the  intellectual  has 
to  fight,  and  to  which  he  usually  succumbs. 

But  this  succumbing  to  the  gospel  of  accomplish- 
ment, which  the  intellectual  often  rationalises  as  the 
victory  of  his  common  sense  and  good  balanced  judg- 
ment, is  really  only  the  outcome  of  an  incredible 
naivete.  The  true  and  permanent  influence  of  the 
intellectual  is  never  so  much  the  result  of  what  he 
specifically  advocates  as  of  the  example  that  he  sets, 
and  of  the  ideas  that  he  clarifies  and  sets  in  motion. 
The  true  and  permanent  influence  of  the  intellectual 
comes  as  much  from  a  complete  lack  of  the  evangel- 
ical temper  as  from  anything  else.  He  is  humble,  but 
without  any  of  the  vain  self-depreciation  that  shrewd 
old  Dr.  Johnson  so  unerringly  exposed;  because  all 
those  really  interested  in  the  life  of  the  mind  are 

50 


WHERE  Are  Our  INTELLECTUALS? 

humble,  humble  before  the  facts.  He  is  hard-work- 
ing and  patient,  unlike  too  many  of  our  contempo- 
rary intellectuals  who  are  just  clever  dilettanti  in 
ideas.  He  is  content  with  what,  to  the  impatient 
reformer,  must  seem  like  very  small  "results." 
Above  all,  precisely  because  he  is  disinterested,  he  is 
objective,  curious,  and  inquiring.  Where  in  this 
present  American  environment  of  propaganda  and 
counter-propaganda,  of  material  triumphs  and  spirit- 
ual defeats,  can  he  be  found?  He  can  not  be  found; 
he  is  too  busy  getting  on  the  band-wagon.  It  is  part 
of  our  national  tradition  that  he  should  get  on  the 
band-wagon,  and  that  he  follows  this  tradition  is 
the  ultimate  reason  why  he  has  such  negligible  in- 
fluence. He  wants  to  "find"  himself  so  eagerly  and 
so  quickly,  that  he  only  succeeds  in  losing  himself 
in  the  crowd. 


51 


ILLUSIONS  of  the 
SOPHISTICATED 

If  one  wished  to  prove  the  soundness  of  the  in- 
stincts of  the  ordinary  man,  one  might  do  it  most 
neatly,  not  by  pointing  out  his  virtues  and  general 
level-headedness,  but  rather  by  revealing  the  naiv- 
etes of  his  betters.  For,  in  truth,  it  is  oftener  the 
sophisticated,  the  intellectual,  and  the  highly  edu- 
cated who  is  the  victim  of  illusion  than  it  is  the  every- 
day man  of  little  or  no  schooling — the  sophisticated 
are  merely  more  ingenious  in  disguising  the  fact. 
Thus,  to  be  specific,  one  might  take  as  a  concrete 
example  of  naivete  on  the  part  of  those  who  most 
pride  themselves  in  their  lack  of  it,  the  fact  that  the 
sophisticated  always  welcome  with  ill-concealed  de- 
light the  downfall  of  the  charlatans  and  mounte- 
banks who  dabble  in  mysticism  of  psychic  phenomena. 
Precisely  what  is  the  flavour  of  the  enjoyment  they 
feel  when  the  tricks  of  "mediums"  are  unmasked? 
Usually  their  explanation  is  that  the  exposure  of 
intellectual  dishonesty — when  it  is  no  worse  than 
that — is  of  itself  a  guarantee  of  a  wholesome  desire 
to  cherish  intellectual  integrity.  This  is  true  enough, 
as  far  as  it  goes.  But  this  is  not  the  whole  reason 
for  the  educated  man's  delight  in  such  exposures,  nor 
in  the  final  analysis,  the  primary  one;  and  just  so  far 
as  the  sophisticated  person  really  imagines  it  to  be 

52 


ILLUSIONS  of  the  SOPHISTICATED 

the  whole  reason,  he  is  as  naive  as  the  gullible  soul 
he  is  "showing  up." 

Untrained,  with  no  scientific  discipline,  without 
perhaps  a  high  degree  of  intelligence,  the  ordinary 
man  rushes  in  where  many  a  philosophical  angel  fears 
to  tread — often,  indeed,  denies  there  is  any  such 
place  to  rush  to.  The  field  of  mysticism,  the  field 
of  the  miasmatic  and  the  unknown  (in  the  common 
sense  of  the  word)  is  a  field  extraordinarily  resist- 
ible to  the  ordinary  rationalistic  methodology.  Its 
concepts  are  much  vaguer  than  the  concepts  of  the 
objective  world  of  observable  fact,  or  at  least  they 
appear  to  be  so.  Its  values  seem  to  have  no  place 
in  the  hierarchy  of  the  ethical  scheme  evolved  by 
the  alertly  logical  intellect.  Consequently  the  sophis- 
ticated person  denies  the  relevancy  of  any  discussion 
of  this  field,  and  he  points  to  the  charlatan  as  a  con- 
firmation of  this  judgment. 

What  has  happened,  of  course,  is  that  a  certain 
field  of  discussion  has  been  declared  closed,  not  be- 
cause it  may  not  exist,  but  because  exact  and  intel- 
ligible exploration  of  it  is  so  unusually  difficult. 
The  ordinary  man,  blissfully  unaware  of  the  severe 
discipline  required  even  to  survey  the  objective,  ob- 
servable world  rationally,  has  none  of  the  sophis- 
ticated person's  qualms  or  fears.  He  has  the  cour- 
age of  his  lack  of  training.  He  dabbles  in  what  is 
usually  called  spiritualism,  because  his  interests  lead 
him  there.  That  he  is  bound  sooner  or  later  to  make 
something  of  a  fool  of  himself  in  his  quest  does  not 
discourage  him.  The  intellectual  it  does  discourage 
rather,   frighten.     The   intellectual   is  often 

53 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

tired  after  a  rational  survey  of  the  observable  world; 
he  finds  that  world  hard  enough  to  be  intellectually 
honest  with;  he  seldom  sighs  for  new  worlds  to 
conquer.  Thus  he  usually  welcomes  those  who, 
when  they  go  outside  the  ordinary  plane  of  rational 
inquiry,  by  their  blunders  and  ineptitudes  apparently 
prove  that  no  other  than  the  ordinary  plane  has 
meaning. 

This  is  an  illusion,  of  course,  the  joint  product  of 
intellectual  weariness  and  cowardice,  and  it  is  here 
that  the  dialectical  geniuses  of  the  East  can  teach  us 
a  wholesome  lesson.  For  in  its  best  estate,  Eastern 
philosophy  does  not  shrink  before  these  new  diffi- 
culties; it  applies  the  logical  process  still  more  rigor- 
ously to  them.  Too  often  your  Western-minded, 
determinedly  objective  and  rationally  purposeful 
thinker,  will  at  that  point  where  reason  needs  to  be 
applied  more  rather  than  less,  simply  deny  the  rele- 
vancy to  the  discussion  of  reason  at  all.  He  will 
deliberately  put  it  outside  rationalistic  controversy; 
for  the  sophisticated  person  is  really  afraid  that  fur- 
ther rigorous,  logical  and  rational  exploration  may 
show  that  all  his  previous  concepts  are  on  a  false 
basis.  Something  of  this  sort  has  happened  in  the 
realm  of  higher  mathematics.  The  present  concept 
of  infinity,  for  instance,  to  a  certain  extent  corrects 
and  to  a  certain  extent  modifies  the  earlier  and  more 
simple  mathematical  concepts,  which,  for  most  prac- 
tical purposes,  were  adequate.  Non-Euclidean  geom- 
etry, for  a  further  instance,  means  nothing  in  the 
world  of  affairs,  yet  ultimately  it  may  radically  mod- 
ify the  whole  methodology  of  formulae,  to  the  ad- 

54 


ILLUSIONS  of  the  SOPHISTICATED 

vantage  of  certain  of  the  more  complicated  higher 
sciences.  This  goes  to  show  that  these  new  concepts 
were  achieved,  not  by  the  abandonment  of  the  ra- 
tional methodology  that  created  the  earlier  and  more 
naive  concepts,  but  by  the  extension  and  intensifica- 
tion of  this  same  methodology.  The  sophisticated 
who  laugh  at  the  ordinary  man  dabbling  in  spiritual- 
ism are  like  the  high  school  teacher  of  algebra  laugh- 
ing at  the  Principia  Mathematica  of  Mr.  Bertrand 
Russell.  They  do  not  see  it,  for  the  people  they 
laugh  at  are  simple,  eager  souls  for  the  most  part; 
but  if  they  had  a  few  highly  disciplined  Eastern 
dialecticians  for  their  opponents,  they  might  laugh, 
as  the  saying  has  it,  on  the  other  side  of  their  face. 
Another  illusion  of  the  sophisticated  springs  from 
a  lack  of  historical  perspective,  and  is,  after  all,  a 
rather  gracious  one.  If  one  surveys  the  record  of 
Western  man,  say  from  1500  or  1000  B.  C.  to  the 
present  time,  it  becomes  apparent  that  those  periods 
in  which  art  has  truly  flourished — those  happy  con- 
junctions and  harmonious  interplay  of  men's  emotions 
and  instincts  with  their  environment — are  but  brief 
interludes  in  a  ceaseless  flow  of  bloodshed,  intoler- 
ance, and  ignorance.  Except  for  the  lucky  few 
caught  in  the  right  generations,  most  of  us  are 
doomed  to  live  in  fallow  periods,  periods  that  live 
on  impassioned  recollection  of  the  past  or  rosy  hope- 
fulness about  the  future.  In  America  of  this  gen- 
eration we  happen  to  be  in  a  fallow  period  of  the 
second  sort,  and  it  is  reasonable  to  suppose  that 
this  eminently  unsatisfactory  condition  may  continue 
for  two  or  three  generations  to  come.     What  we 

55 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

know  as  romantic  Western  Christianity  is  infallibly 
coming  to  an  end,  and  there  are  few  civilised  men 
to  watch  its  demise  with  regret.  Yet  the  will  to  dis- 
cover the  best  is  strong  in  all  of  us,  and  in  the  sophis- 
ticated this  will  is  always  manifest  in  an  exaggerated 
emphasis  upon  the  importance  of  art. 

Now  art,  of  course,  is  important,  but  it  is  never 
important  when  it  is  taken  in  an  important  way. 
Art  is  important  as  a  fact — as  distinguished  from  a 
recollection  or  a  hope — only  when  it  is  unconscious, 
that  is  to  say,  spontaneous.  But  art  is  seldom  spon- 
taneous when  people  talk  about  it;  it  is  spontaneous 
when  people  live  it — when  the  expression  of  happy 
life  flows  without  let  or  hindrance  into  song  or  poetry 
or  music  or  painting  or  sculpture.  It  is  a  paean  of 
accomplishment,  as  a  man  whistles  when  he  is  well 
content  with  the  things  of  this  world.  It  is  the  sign 
of  a  happy  marriage  between  instinct  and  instinct's 
object.  When  it  exists,  it  does  not  require  discussion ; 
it  incites  enjoyment.  Like  love  and  pleasure  and 
the  amenities  of  life,  it  is  a  by-product.  It  is  a  sym- 
bol of  success. 

The  naivete  of  the  sophisticated  is  strikingly  re- 
vealed in  their  exaggerated  emphasis  upon  aesthetic 
values.  They  do  not  want  to  face  the  hard,  unpleas- 
ant facts — that  the  period  in  which  they  happen  to  be 
living  is  ugly  and  balked.  Their  method  of  escape  is 
the  simple  one  of  talking  much  about  beauty.  Of 
course,  there  is  a  certain  charm  in  this;  the  wan 
vitality  of  tradition  may  be  reflected  in  ancient  cathed- 
rals and  noble,  antiquated  poems.  The  timelessness 
of  classic  forms  can  always  be  reaffirmed,  and  to 

56 


ILLUSIONS  of  the  SOPHISTICATED 

some  extent  the  old  emotions  may  be  rekindled. 
But  the  emotional  satisfactions  of  feeding  upon  tra- 
dition are  like  thin  tapers  of  light  compared  with 
the  sunshine  of  creative  living,  to  which  art  is  a 
musical  accompaniment.  There  is  dignity  and  some 
pathos  in  the  situation  of  the  cultured  and  civilised, 
caught,  as  they  are,  in  a  crude  era  of  the  modern 
machine  organisation  and  slave  State.  There  is, 
too,  illusion — the  old  illusion  that  the  stuff  of  our 
dreams  may  soften  the  outlines  of  reality,  may  cap- 
ture glamour  just  as  the  hunter  traps  birds.  Yet 
before  the  inexorable  facts  of  life  the  illusion,  for  all 
its  kindliness  and  generous  warmth,  seems  wholly 
naive. 

Closely  connected  with  this  self-deception  about 
art,  are  the  more  conventional  self-deceptions  about 
progress  and  democracy.  In  these  two  instances  the 
influence  of  social  custom  and  structure  is  so  subtle 
and  persuasive  that  even  to  raise  the  question  has  in 
most  quarters  the  flavour  of  heresy.  Professor 
George  Santayana  has  shown,  in  an  admirable  essay 
in  his  latest  book,  "Character  and  Opinion  in  the 
United  States,"  how  even  so  independent  and  fear- 
less a  mind  as  that  of  William  James  could  not  escape 
the  milieu  of  Cambridge  and  America :  "He  seems 
to  have  felt  sure,"  says  Professor  Santayana,  "that 
certain  thoughts  and  hopes — those  familiar  to  a 
liberal  Protestantism — were  every  man's  true  friends 
in  life.  This  assumption  would  have  been  hard  to 
defend  if  he  or  those  habitually  addressed  had  ever 
questioned  it;  yet  his  whole  argument  for  voluntarily 
cultivating  these  beliefs  rests  on  this  assumption,  that 

57 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

they  are  beneficient."  Yet  of  all  the  illusions  which' 
revolt  the  soul,  the  illusion  of  progress  is  the  most 
trying,  the  illusion  that  mere  chronology  in  time 
works  automatically  towards  moral  ends.  This  teleo- 
logical  superstition  has  been  scorned  by  real  thinkers 
in  every  age  and  in  every  country;  that  it  happens 
to  exist  to-day,  with  more  social  compulsion  than 
ever  before,  means  merely  that  the  real  thinker  is 
having  a  more  difficult  time  of  it.  Indeed,  his  ener- 
gies are  almost  wholly  concerned  in  fighting  a  use- 
less battle,  for  it  is  the  sophisticated  people,  who  are 
naturally  his  audience  and  his  supporters,  that  cher- 
ish this  illusion  most  strongly.  The  plain  man  often 
has  his  doubts  about  progress;  frequently  he  is  more 
of  a  genuine  sceptic  than  are  the  educated. 

Similarly  with  democracy,  the  illusion  has  social 
sanctions  which  are  very  difficult  to  resist.  One  has 
to  be  on  one's  guard  here  about  definitions.  As  one 
understands  democracy,  one  is  a  democrat;  one  be- 
lieves in  equality.  But,  in  the  words  of  Aristotle, 
"equality  is  just — but  only  between  equals."  The 
current  theory  of  democracy,  that  the  decision  of 
fifty-one  per  cent  has  a  sovereign  virtue,  must  be  re- 
jected utterly.  The  notion  that  sovereignty,  in  the 
final  analysis,  rests  anywhere  but  in  individual  voli- 
tion, openly  and  freely  arrived  at;  that  government 
or  the  State  or  the  Church  or  any  other  abstract  in- 
stitution has  any  final  authority,  that  it  has  any  other 
function  than  one  of  convenience,  is  as  great  a  super- 
stition as  that  of  the  divine  right  of  kings.  Yet  one 
can  search  the  highways  and  the  by-ways  before  one 
can  find  the  sophisticated  person  to  agree  with  this. 

58 


LOST  in  the  CROWD 

If  a  social  psychologist  should  take  the  trouble  to 
compute  the  amount  of  time  that  the  average  citizen 
of  any  big  American  city  spends  as  a  member  of  one 
or  another  kind  of  crowd,  he  would  get  a  vivid  sense 
of  the  importance  of  his  own  subject :  and  at  the  same 
time  he  would  quickly  realise  how  unscientific  and 
speculative  that  subject  still  is.  Experimental  psy- 
chology, educational  psychology,  neurology,  psychi- 
atry, reaction-time  to  pain,  and  so  on — all  seem  to  be 
commendably  disciplined  sciences  in  comparison  with 
the  vague  and  nebulous  field  of  phenomena  called 
social  psychology.  Yet  it  is  precisely  this  vague  and 
nebulous  field  which  is  of  primary  importance  for  the 
humanist.  It  is  man  reacting  as  a  whole,  and  not  in 
parts,  which  is  the  humanist's  first  consideration;  and 
it  is  just  there  that  the  social  psychologist,  in  spite 
of  the  regrettably  elementary  nature  of  his  science, 
can  help  him  most.  For  in  considering  the  modern 
man  as  a  whole,  the  first  thing  that  strikes  a  dis- 
passionate observer  is  the  fact  that  he  lives  as  an  in- 
dividual only  about  one-twentieth  of  his  waking,  con- 
scious life.  The  other  nineteen-twentieths  he  spends 
as  a  member  of  a  crowd.  Personal  individuality  is 
almost  completely  smothered;  indeed  with  a  few 
more  mechanistic  developments  in  our  modern  civil- 
isation it  may  some  day  be  smothered  altogether. 

Consider,   for   example,   the   average   city-man's 

59 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

daily  routine.  He  gets  up,  let  us  say,  at  eight.  He 
shaves  and  washes  his  teeth,  using  a  standardised 
razor  and  soap  and  tooth-brush.  He  gets  into 
standardised  clothes  and  eats  a  more  or  less  stand- 
ardised breakfast.  Then  he  comes  to  his  office  by 
train  or  subway,  reading  his  morning  newspaper; 
which  again  hundreds  of  thousands  of  others  are 
doing  at  that  same  moment  of  time.  In  one  sense, 
his  newspaper  is  just  another  crowd  to  which  he  be- 
longs. At  his  office  he  goes  through  the  routine  of 
his  business,  sharing  the  crowd-assumptions  of  the 
organisation  of  which  he  is  a  part,  and  in  general 
sharing  the  wider  assumptions  of  the  whole  business- 
world  in  which  his  particular  organisation  functions. 
After  a  hasty  lunch  eaten  with  the  crowd  he  goes  back 
to  the  afternoon  routine;  and  then  goes  home  with 
the  crowd,  reading  his  evening  newspaper  the  while. 
Possibly  after  dinner  he  goes  to  a  show,  to  his  lodge, 
or  to  a  friendly  game  of  poker  with  the  boys. 

Thus  he  spends  the  larger  part  of  the  day  as  a 
member  of  a  crowd;  but  this  fact  barely  begins  to 
tell  the  story.  When  he  is  alone,  or  when  for  a 
moment  or  two  he  stumbles  on  the  curb,  day-dream- 
ing and  not  keenly  aware  of  his  immediate  environ- 
ment, his  mind  is  full  of  crowd-assumptions,  snatches 
of  propaganda  from  his  newspaper,  dramatisations 
of  himself  before  certain  crowds;  and  if  the  average 
city-man  once  gave  an  honest  introspective  account 
of  his  own  stream  of  consciousness,  he  would  be 
astonished  at  how  little  of  that  stream  is  his  personal 
own,  and  how  much  of  it  is  contributed  by  the  crowds 
which  press  upon  him  from  all  sides. 

60 


LOST  in  the  CROWD 

While  man  is  largely  a  social  animal,  he  was  never 
meant  to  be  as  social  as  all  this.  Somehow  or  other, 
human  individuality  must  peep  through  the  smother- 
ing blanket  of  modern  crowds;  and  what  is  happen- 
ing to-day  is  a  curious  and  dangerous  exemplification 
of  this  ancient  truth.  Curious,  because  man  is  mak- 
ing use  of  the  very  thing  that  is  crushing  him;  dan- 
gerous, because  he  is  not  making  a  success  of  it. 

Before  19 14  it  would  perhaps  have  been  difficult 
to  make  it  clear  how  modern  man  is  using  the  crowd 
to  give  vent  to  those  very  dispositions  of  which  so- 
ciety as  a  whole  must  disapprove.  Fortunately  the 
experiences  of  the  war  and  of  the  period  of  intensive 
propaganda  since  the  war,  make  the  assertion  ap- 
pear less  paradoxical  to-day.  It  is  a  thesis  that  social 
psychologists,  for  example  so  able  a  writer  as  Mr. 
Everett  Dean  Martin,  are  increasingly  emphasising. 
Investigation  has  not  gone  far  yet,  but  the  importance 
of  further  investigation  and  research  can  not  be 
underestimated. 

Briefly,  the  facts  appear  to  be  something  thus: 
The  anti-social  dispositions  in  man,  the  crude  sexual 
waywardnesses  and  anarchial  aggressiveness,  for  in- 
stance, are  ordinarily  disciplined  by  the  civilised  en- 
vironment and  by  teaching;  the  result  of  which  is  to 
push  them  back  into  the  unconscious  where  they  take 
their  revenge,  innocently  in  the  form  of  dreams,  and 
savagely  in  the  form  of  sudden  pathological  out- 
bursts. This  is  fairly  familiar;  the  strain  of  balked 
dispositions  created  by  modern  civilisation  is  to-day 
a  well-worn  theme.  In  contrast  to  these  wild  anti- 
social impulses  are  usually  set  the  so-called  social  dis- 

61 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

positions;  to  gain  prestige  in  the  community;  to  be 
well  thought  of;  to  build  a  family;  to  rise  in  one's 
profession;  to  take  part  in  public  affairs;  and  so  on. 
Society,  groups,  clubs,  nations,  communities  are  then 
pictured  as  organisations  which  perform  the  double 
function  of  stimulating  these  social  dispositions  in 
man  and  of  furnishing  the  means  through  which  these 
aroused  dispositions  can  find  satisfaction.  It  is  con- 
ventional to  call  a  man  civilised  when  the  second 
group  of  dispositions  has  developed  power  enough 
to  hold  the  first  group  in  check.  Society,  and  the 
groups  into  which  society  naturally  divides  itself, 
are  supposed  to  furnish  the  most  efficacious  aid  in 
stimulating  man  to  develop  such  power.  The  strain 
of  the  balked  dispositions  is  then  supposed  some- 
how to  disappear  into  thin  air,  to  have  been  civilised 
away;  or  in  our  modern  jargon,  sublimated. 

The  war  and  its  aftermath  have  clearly  shown  us 
that  this  analysis  is  much  too  simple.  The  anti-social 
dispositions  manage  to  break  through  in  spite  of  all; 
and  the  amazing  thing  is  that  they  break  through 
by  using  a  crowd  as  the  means  of  their  expression. 
For  example,  to  think  of  the  nation  as  a  whole  is 
to  be  social  in  a  large  and  wholesome  way;  yes,  but 
in  time  of  war,  thinking  of  the  nation  as  a  whole  be- 
comes translated  into  entirely  different  terms.  It 
is  to  hate  the  enemy  and  to  release  vicariously  all 
those  fugitive  sadistic  impulses  which  ordinarily  are 
kept  decently  hidden.  Again,  to  act  as  part  of  the 
crowd  in  a  lynching  party  is  a  social  act,  in  so  far 
as  one  is  associated  with  many  people  in  the  enter- 

62 


LOST  in  the  CROWD 

prise;  but  it  also  releases  the  most  anti-social  im- 
pulses imaginable. 

These,  it  will  be  demurred,  are  extreme  cases.  To 
be  sure;  yet  they  illustrate  graphically  the  principle 
in  question.  More  and  more  as  one  studies  the  sub- 
ject, does  it  become  clear  that  propaganda,  reform, 
standardisation,  intolerance  are  all  parts  of  the  same 
sort  of  thing — the  use  of  the  crowd  to  give  vent  to 
dispositions  which  in  themselves  deserve  to  be  called 
anti-social.  To  a  certain  extent  this  has  always  hap- 
pened in  human  history;  it  has  been  a  way  of  balanc- 
ing repression  with  release;  but  never  has  this  prin- 
ciple been  so  ubiquitous  and  insidious  as  it  is  to-day. 
The  fanatic  speaking  for  his  small  minority,  a  crowd 
of  which  he  is  an  important  part,  and  attempting  to 
impose  the  views  and  dogma  of  that  minority  on 
everybody  else  by  weapon  or  by  threat,  enjoys  the 
warm  glow  of  the  social  approval  of  his  group  along 
with  the  personal  satisfaction  which  comes  from  re- 
leasing his  personal  impulses  towards  cruelty.  The 
ordinary  man  reading  his  newspaper  and  chuckling 
over  some  unfair  attack  on  a  politician  who  belongs 
to  the  party  for  which  he  does  not  vote,  is  under- 
going the  same  kind  of  psychological  process. 

Now,  the  dangerous  side  of  this  method  of  finding 
release  for  certain  dispositions  does  not,  as  we  might 
at  first  suppose,  lie  in  the  fact  of  the  release  itself. 
Until  we  find  a  more  civilised  way  of  handling  them, 
the  bottled-up  dispositions  of  man  towards  aggres- 
sion and  anarchy  will  be  periodically  drained  away 
in  wars.  War  has  that  indubitable  psychological 
function;  and  we  have  never  squarely  faced  the  prob- 

63 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

lem  of  finding  its  moral  equivalent.  The  deeper 
danger  in  this  method  of  releasing  certain  disposi- 
tions is  that  the  creative  impulses,  too,  are  under  a 
strain  in  modern  life;  and  they,  too,  find  their  vent 
through  the  medium  of  the  crowd  instead  of  through 
the  expression  of  human  personality. 

This,  it  seems  to  us,  is  the  underlying  reason  for 
the  deeper  dissatisfaction  of  man  with  modern  civili- 
sation. Increasingly  the  only  method  he  can  employ 
for  the  expression  of  his  individuality  is  through  the 
crowd.  He  must  use  an  instrument  which  in  a  sense 
is  a  denial  of  his  original  purpose.  To  express  his 
individuality  he  must  employ  the  very  thing  that  is 
by  nature  designed  to  smother  it.  It  is  a  dilemma 
that  our  modern  form  of  civilisation  has  posed  for 
us,  by  accident  rather  than  design.  But  it  is  a  di- 
lemma that  we  must  somehow  resolve  if  the  spiritual 
integrity  of  the  individual  man  is  to  be  preserved. 


64 


An  INTELLECTUAL  EGGSHELL 
PERIOD 

The  steadily  progressing  relegation  in  this  coun- 
try of  the  lusts  of  the  body  to  a  furtive  subterranean 
life — the  climax  of  the  neo-Puritan  regime  under 
which  we  live  before,  as  we  hope,  the  inevitable  reac- 
tion comes  upon  us — has  had  disastrous  social  conse- 
quences; this  will  hardly  be  denied.  Healthy  sexual 
impulses  have  been  transformed  into  a  back-of-the- 
barn  sort  of  an  affair;  natural  laziness,  the  deep  in- 
stinctive contempt  for  work  as  such  and  the  necessary 
forerunner  to  the  play,  or  creative  impulse,  has  be- 
come a  sin  against  the  modern  spirit;  the  drinking 
of  wine,  an  amiable  and  glorious  tradition,  has  been 
ignominiously  thrust  into  the  environment  of  what  is 
graphically  and  accurately  known  as  a  blind  pig; 
the  impulse  of  anger  and  belligerency  has  been 
drained  away  by  a  ridiculous  emphasis  upon  physical 
training  of  the  set,  mechanical  type  and  by  games 
which  have  little  of  the  sting  of  adventure  left  in 
them.  Santayana  a  few  years  ago  diagnosed  the  case 
correctly  when  he  said  that  the  true  symptom  of  the 
anaemia  of  the  age  was  its  emphasis  upon  virility — 
and  ironically  enough,  at  a  time  when  most  of  Europe 
is  suffering  from  malnutrition,  never  in  America  has 
the  preoccupation  with  physical  well-being  been  so 
great.  It  greets  us  daily  in  the  street-cars  with  their 
eternal  indigestion-cure  advertisements;  in  the  news- 

65 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

papers  with  their  page  displays  of  how  life  may  be 
•extended;  in  the  interminable  interest  in  interstitial 
and  other  glands  and  in  frequent  stories  of  how 
run-down  men  of  sixty  can  be  changed  into  frolicsome 
colts  of  twenty-five.  It  would  require  a  diligent  sta- 
tistician to  enumerate  the  different  brands  of  tooth- 
paste, the  thousands  of  new  styles  of  soap,  the  long 
list  of  patent  antiseptics.  We  want  to  acquire  life, 
as  we  acquire  possessions.  We  are  afraid  of  dirt; 
afraid  of  disease;  afraid  of  death.  We  are  afraid 
even  of  morbidity.  And  most  of  all  we  are  afraid 
of  unleashing  any  of  those  natural  impulses  of  the 
body  which,  by  the  merest  unhappy  chance,  might 
lead  even  remotely  to  any  of  those  things.  Yet  to  be 
so  afraid  of  disease  and  death,  almost  hysterically 
afraid  as  we  are,  is  at  bottom  only  to  be  afraid  of 
life  itself.  The  coward,  says  a  Japanese  proverb, 
dies  many  deaths,  the  brave  man  only  one.  Our 
modern  psycho-analysts  can  tell  us  a  pretty  story  of 
the  many  American  neurotics  they  have  to  treat  for 
this  more  fatal  disease  of  anticipatory  extinction. 

Now,  this  exaggerated  emphasis  upon  health,  with 
its  invariable  concomitant  of  an  iron  discipline  over 
what  are  regarded  as  the  wayward  impulses  of  the 
body  (a  similar  discipline  was  the  precursor  of 
Sparta's  downfall),  is  always  the  stigma  of  true 
anaemia  as  it  is  the  first  characteristic  of  Puritanism. 
True  health  is  joyous  and  reckless,  it  comes  from 
plunging  fearlessly  into  life;  it  has  little  relation  to 
our  contemporary  specious  well-being  that  is  but  a 
life-long  grovelling  before  bacilli.  Above  all,  Puri- 
tanism loves  to  hide  its  terror  of  joy  and  natural 

66 


•An  INTELLECTUAL  EGGSHELL  PERIOD 

animal  gaiety  behind  the  arras  of  Anglo-Saxon  hu- 
manitarianism  and  an  intense  regard  for  future  gen- 
erations— a  regard,  by  the  way,  biologically  suspi- 
cious in  itself,  since  those  races  which  have  given 
little  or  no  thought  to  the  welfare  of  future  gen- 
erations seem  to  have  produced  the  most  numerous 
and  the  most  healthy  progeny.  But  the  point  here 
is  that  this  shivering,  corn-fed  timidity  before  the 
joyous  waywardness  and  gaiety  of  life  dominates 
in  American  culture  and  social  manners  to-day.  It 
may  be  inwardly  weak,  as  we  believe  it  is;  yet  it 
occupies  the  strategic  position  in  our  contemporary 
civilisation.  Able  to  set  the  social  standards,  it 
keeps  the  majority  of  the  populace  (which  secretly 
despises  these  arrogant  minorities)  screwed  up  to  a 
kind  of  verbal  and  external  obedience.  That  is  the 
inevitable  price  we  have  to  pay  for  still  living  under 
the  pioneer  tradition,  where  to  go  against  the  tribal 
sanctions  was,  as  it  still  is,  the  ultimate  sin.  Be- 
cause such  uniformity  was  a  pragmatic  necessity  in 
the  early  days  of  our  national  life,  we  are  still  to-day 
— when  conditions  are  so  rapidly  changing — content 
to  be  led  around  by  the  nose  by  these  self-appointed 
dictators  of  national  morals.  Sooner  or  later  there 
will  be  a  reaction  against  them. 

For  fundamentally,  so  we  think,  the  American 
temperament  (as  distinguished  from  the  purely 
Anglo-Saxon  temperament)  is  not  of  this  morbid, 
timorous,  Puritanical,  conformistic  strain  at  all — 
life  would  be  intolerable,  if  we  were  so  pessimistic 
as  to  have  to  think  so.  Puritanism  of  the  kind  that 
rules  us  to-day  came  from  the  fens  and  dour  marshes 

67 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

of  Prussia,  from  a  land  of  fog  and  brutality  and  no 
joy.  It  acquired  certain  hypocritical  twists  in  its 
passage  through  the  British  Isles,  although  it  has 
never  changed  its  basic  character.  But  it  is  a  quality 
of  thought  and  life  really  not  adapted  to  the  Amer- 
ican environment  and  temperament  at  all,  and  only  a 
sort  of  deliquescent  pioneer  docility,  so  to  speak, 
gives  it  its  temporary  strangle-hold.  We  are  a  land 
of  sunshine  and  plenty;  a  land  of  sparkling,  elec- 
trical air;  a  land  of  many  strains  of  blood,  quickly 
transforming  themselves  in  the  amalgam  into  a  type 
quite  distinct  from  the  Anglo-Saxon  (just  as  the 
American  Indian,  originally  Mongolian,  soon  became 
a  distinct  type).  Give  us  half  a  chance,  and  we  like 
nothing  better  than  to  laugh  and  play  and  be  gay. 
We  have  abundant  vitality,  if  the  truth  were  known; 
it  is  just  an  historical  anachronism  that  to-day  we 
are  ruled  by  the  anaemic,  the  feminine,  and  the 
fearful. 

But  where  then,  in  this  unpleasant  transition  pe- 
riod, does  our  vitality  express  itself,  cramped  and 
thwarted  as  it  is?  Subterraneously,  as  we  have  said, 
on  its  more  joyous  side.  Into  business  and  the  mak- 
ing of  money  on  its  aggressive  side,  although  here 
too  a  great  deal  of  romantic  nonsense  is  talked  about 
the  "intense"  American  business  man,  for  business 
is  almost  as  much  a  game  with  us  as  golf  or  base- 
ball. On  its  darker  side,  it  goes  into  lynching  and 
violence  of  all  kinds.  And  on  the  side  of  plain 
neurology,  if  one  likes,  a  great  deal  of  real  energy 
is  consumed  in  gum-chewing,  rocking-chair  ecstasy, 
and  "jazz."    Pitiful  substitutes,  to  be  sure,  and  often 

68 


An  INTELLECTUAL  EGGSHELL  PERIOD 

unpleasant  ones  from  the  purely  medical  point  of 
view,  as  any  honest  psychiatrist  can  tell  us.  Yet 
proof,  too,  that  all  vitality  has  not  been  quite  vacuum- 
cleaned  out  of  us  by  the  moralists.  The  very  energy 
of  our  contemporary  adulation  of  our  anaemia  is 
proof — well,  proof,  paradoxically,  that  the  vitality 
to  destroy  it  is  still  there. 

But  none  of  this  thwarted  energy — and  it  is  a  very 
melancholy  thing  to  reflect  upon — gets  into  our  intel- 
lectual life.  With  us  it  was  a  natural  pioneer  tradi- 
tion that  to  be  interested  in  the  life  of  reason  was 
in  itself  rather  feminine  and  sissified.  We  are  far 
from  having  finished  with  what  Mr.  Van  Wyck 
Brooks  has  so  aptly  called  the  apotheosis  of  the  low- 
brow. And  for  the  next  generation  of  young  men, 
who  will  still  in  all  probability  be  living  under  the 
tyranny  of  anaemia,  the  outlook  is  particularly  black. 
Balzac  had  a  very  fine  phrase  to  describe  a  period 
through  which  every  young  man  ought  to  go,  the 
period  of  nostalgie  de  la  boue.  Where,  however, 
will  this  next  generation  turn  when  this  period  of  late 
adolescence  comes  upon  it?  There  will  be  no  mud, 
only  Y.  M.  C.  A.'s  and  Chautauquas — and  back-of- 
the-barn.  The  healthy  and  vigorous  will  turn  to 
the  subterranean  expression  of  their  vitality,  the  only 
expression  vouchsafed  them.  The  censorship  and 
the  social  conventions  will  prevent  any  of  this  vital- 
ity finding  its  natural  vent  in  literature  or  in  art, 
where  it  might  be  lifted  into  rhyme  and  colour,  as 
youth,  when  let  alone,  is  usually  eager  to  have  it. 
Those  who  have  the  very  vitality  most  needed  for 
the  true  life  of  the  mind  will  be  shame-faced  and 

69 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

secretive  and  furtive  about  those  very  impulses, 
which,  if  they  but  understood  them,  did  them  the 
most  credit.  Consequently  the  intellectual  life  of  the 
nation  will  be  left  to  the  colourless,  the  timid,  and 
the  weak.  It  will  be  a  period  of  preciosite  and 
dilettantism  in  a  bad  sense — that  is,  a  period  arising 
not  as  a  kind  of  reaction  to  too  sturdy  vitality  (like 
the  fin  de  siecle  period  in  the  France  of  Baudelaire 
and  Verlaine)  but  from  a  shrinking  before  the  facts 
of  life.  It  will  be  thin  and  brittle,  like  an  eggshell 
easily  cracked,  but  an  eggshell  without  an  egg,  either 
rotten  or  sound,  inside  it,  an  eggshell  covering  an 
intellectual  void. 


70 


A  QUESTION  of  MORALS 

The  unsuspecting  foreigner  in  these  parts  might 
plausibly  imagine  that  the  "Make  Your  Own"  signs 
increasingly  displayed  in  our  grocery  shops  are  one 
side  of  a  jovial  campaign  by  manufacturers  of  ciga- 
rette paper  to  get  smokers  to  roll  their  own.  And 
if  he  picks  up  one  of  our  weekly  sporting  papers, 
attracted  by  the  girls  in  the  one-piece  bathing  suits 
on  the  cover,  he  will,  when  he  reads  the  following 
advertisement,  be  impressed  at  our  regard  for  na- 
tional hygiene: 

STILLS!   STILLS! 

We  can  furnish  you  a  Pure  Copper  Distilling  Outfit,  com- 
plete and  ready  for  use  that  is  ideal  for  the  home,  garage 
or  laboratory.  This  is  the  most  practical  still  ever  devised 
and  will  last  a  life-time.  Capacity,  one  gallon.  Suitable 
for  distillation  of  any  kind  of  liquid.  It  has  plenty  of 
space  for  boiling  and  with  a  slow  fire  will  produce  distilled 
liquids  at  the  rate  of  two  quarts  an  hour.  Auto-owners 
need  them  to  distil  water  for  batteries.  Distilled  water  is 
the  best  safeguard  against  "flu,"  fevers  and  other  diseases. 

There  is  never  any  mention  of  alcohol  as  such, 
and  the  foreigner  must  know  that  this  is  a  prohibi- 
tion country  where  intoxicating  liquors  are  forbidden 
not  by  any  mere  local-option  mandate,  but  by  the 
supreme  law  of  the  land.  The  native  American  may 
put  his  tongue  in  his  cheek  and  look  knowingly  out 
of  the  corner  of  his  left  eye  when  he  reads  this  sum- 

71 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

mons  to  a  sanitary  life;  in  fact,  he  often  emits  loud 
guffaws.  The  foreigner,  of  course,  will  have  to  at- 
tribute such  performances  to  our  peculiar  sense  of 
humour;  on  the  surface,  these  are  all  excessively 
moral  and  law-abiding  advertisements,  and  he  ought 
to  be  duly  impressed.    He  usually  is. 

Indeed  our  surface-morality  is  the  most  impressive 
thing  about  us;  it  might  be  said  to  be  our  peculiar 
contribution  to  the  ethical  schemes  of  the  world. 
Nowhere  as  in  America  and  Great  Britain  has  the 
technique  of  the  formal  and  public  adherence  to 
virtue  been  so  highly  developed.  When  Mayor  Gay- 
nor  tackled  the  problem  of  prostitution  in  New  York 
City,  with  his  customary  frankness  and  gift  for  le 
mot  juste,  he  coined  the  phrase  "the  outward  sem- 
blance of  order  and  decency."  It  was  brutal  but 
revealing.  For  if  there  is  one  common  characteristic 
of  Anglo-Saxon  morality,  wherever  and  whenever 
it  appears,  it  is  this:  On  no  account  admit  anything, 
on  no  account  be  found  out,  on  no  account  let  any- 
thing become  public.  If  Germany  had  not  been  so 
unsophisticated  in  international  diplomacy,  she  would 
never  have  admitted  that  she  did  wrong  in  violating 
the  neutrality  of  Belgium;  the  proper  attitude  was  to 
have  pointed  out  the  special  moral  benefits  which 
accrued  to  Belgium  in  particular  and  the  world  in 
general,  by  her  action.  Anglo-Saxon  diplomacy  has 
long  since  learned  the  trick  of  acting  the  role  of  a 
shocked  saviour  of  civilisation,  whenever  it  is  up 
to  some  exceptionally  underhanded  deal,  and  al- 
though we  are  comparatively  new  at  the  game,  we 
have  taken  our  elementary  course  of  instruction  under 

72 


A  QUESTION  of  MORALS 

the  Wilson  regime.  But  at  all  costs,  the  outward 
semblance  of  order  and  decency  must  be  preserved. 
Although,  in  defiance  of  certain  Constitutional 
Amendments,  the  negro  is  robbed  of  his  suffrage 
rights  in  the  South,  we  must  always  be  sure  to  speak 
of  how  the  Civil  War  freed  the  slaves,  and  never 
refer  to  Lincoln  except  as  the  Great  Emancipator. 
Although,  in  defiance  of  a  later  Constitutional 
Amendment,  liquor  is  still  made,  sold  and  consumed, 
we  must  always  speak  of  the  prohibition  issue  as 
closed;  or,  as  Mr.  Bryan  has  phrased  it,  as  dead  as 
slavery.  Although  in  no  country  is  what  is  euphe- 
mistically termed  sexual  irregularity  more  widely 
practised  than  in  America,  we  still  continue  to  ideal- 
ise our  women  on  the  covers  of  our  popular  maga- 
zines; and  although  in  no  country  is  the  conversa- 
tion of  men  alone  more  direct  and  vulgar,  we  still 
subsidise  organisations  whose  sole  task  is  to  deodour- 
ise  our  books  and  plays  and  moving-pictures.  In- 
deed, cynics  have  said  that  we  are  too  anasmic  in  our 
impulses  to  take  natural  waywardnesses  simply  and 
frankly,  and  we  are  compelled  to  make  them  pub- 
licly forbidden  in  order  to  render  them  secretly  at- 
tractive. 

But  this  sharp  dichotomy  between  profession  and 
practice,  which  is  so  characteristic  of  Anglo-Saxon 
morality  and  which  other  civilisations  invariably 
term  hypocritical,  does  not,  in  our  opinion,  spring 
from  any  native  weakness  of  impulse  towards  the 
world,  the  flesh  and  the  devil.  On  the  contrary, 
those  impulses  are  too  often  embarrassingly  vigor- 
ous, and  the  public  prohibition  of  any  open  manifes- 

73 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

tation  of  them  is  a  symbol  of  our  fear  of  letting  our- 
selves go.  Our  morality  system  has  become  a  me- 
chanical device  for  protecting  us  against  ourselves; 
it  is  the  handiwork  of  terror.  Rather  does  the 
dichotomy  between  profession  and  practice  spring 
from  a  false  conception  of  the  good  life;  from  an 
elementary  but  persistent  confusion  of  real  ethical 
values.  If  that  confusion  were  merely  a  mistake  in 
thinking,  a  mere  intellectual  defect  of  our  tempera- 
ment, there  would  be  no  particular  point  in  being 
upset  about  it.  But  unfortunately  it  is  of  very  great 
practical  importance.  Increasingly  our  civilisation 
is  becoming  hysterical,  because  of  the  inner  strain 
which  this  false  dualism  produces;  increasingly  the 
younger  generation  is  being  poisoned  in  its  attitude 
towards  the  joyous  things  of  life;  increasingly  we  are 
all  losing  the  capacity  for  trusting  ourselves.  More 
and  more  our  civilisation  is  becoming  not  a  civilisa- 
tion of  free  men  but  of  moral  cowards. 

Now,  the  false  conception  which  has  brought  about 
this  unpleasant  state  of  things  really  goes  back  to 
the  doctrine  of  original  sin,  especially  to  Calvin.  If 
the  early  18th  century  romanticists  erred  in  believing 
that  mankind  was  a  goddess  in  petticoats,  the  mod- 
ern Puritans,  who  set  the  tone  of  our  Anglo-Saxon 
morality,  more  certainly  err  in  believing  mankind 
a  devil  in  a  strait-jacket.  But  the  problem  is  really 
neither  one  of  taking  off  the  petticoats  nor  multiply- 
ing the  chains  on  the  strait-jacket;  the  quarrel  over 
the  question  of  whether  man  is  naturally  good  or 
naturally  bad,  is  futile  and  unreal.  Man  is  naturally 
a  bundle  of  different  dispositions;  and  the  ethical 

74 


A  QUESTION  of  MORALS 

problem,  so  far  as  it  can  be  said  to  exist  at  all,  is 
how  to  focus  the  chief  of  those  dispositions  on  ob- 
jects which  shall  bring  about  the  greatest  amount 
of  harmony  among  these  dispositions  rather  than  the 
greatest  amount  of  disharmony.  This  has  a  sus- 
piciously simple  sound,  yet  as  a  matter  of  fact  not 
even  an  approach  to  the  problem  can  be  made  as 
long  as  the  doctrine  persists  that  what  one  really 
wants  to  do  must  in  the  nature  of  things  be  evil.  That 
is  the  contemporary  Anglo-Saxon  official  doctrine, 
and  it  is  not  merely  false,  but  positively  dangerous. 
What  one  wants  to  do  can  be  adjudged  good  or  bad 
only  by  virtue  of  the  consequences;  in  itself,  such  a 
want  or  desire  has  only  a  subjective  and  flickering 
meaning;  one  can  not  even  define  it  in  ethical  terms 
until  it  has  been  projected  outward  into  the  objective 
world  and  there  set  in  motion.  True  restraint,  to 
sum  up  the  whole  objection,  comes  not  from  the 
eternal  No  of  negation  and  passivity,  but  from  the 
eternal  Yes  of  affirmation  and  activity.  It  springs 
not  from  the  checking  of  desire  but  from  the  abun- 
dance of  it. 

This  is  hard  doctrine  to  make  clear,  for  it  runs 
directly  counter  to  social  conventions  and  normal 
ethical  assumptions.  Nietzsche,  for  example,  strug- 
gled long  to  make  this  conception  understand- 
able; as  when  he  said  in  his  "Anti-Christ"  that  the 
real  sin  was  to  give  out  of  a  sense  of  charity,  when 
the  only  truly  ethical  way  was  to  give  out  of  an 
abundance.  Yet  even  he,  for  all  the  sharp  vividness 
of  his  epigrams  and  the  flashing  insight  of  what  some 
one  has  called  ecstatic  common-sense,  never  fully 

75 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

succeeded;  and  we  ourselves  are  only  vain  enough 
to  hope  that  we  can  throw  out  a  suggestion  or  two. 
In  the  simple  case  of  robbery,  for  instance,  the  man 
who  does  not  pick  my  pocket  because  he  is  terrified 
at  the  thought  of  a  possible  prison-sentence,  would 
hardly,  even  in  Anglo-Saxon  countries,  be  thought  an 
object  of  high  ethical  approval.  So  far  as  any  ques- 
tion of  moral  praise  or  blame  goes,  it  will  apply  only 
to  the  man  to  whom  such  an  action  would  never  nat- 
urally occur,  even  under  the  stress  of  great  want  and 
hardship.  Here  we  can  begin  to  see  that  it  is  not 
so  much  a  problem  of  struggling  against  our  desires, 
as  a  problem  of  what  desires  we  have.  Yet  apply  the 
parallel  further,  to  chastity,  for  instance :  The 
chastity  which  is  the  by-product  of  timidity,  fear  of 
adventure,  terror  of  disease,  shrinking  from  social 
penalties — is  it  not  precisely  this  kind  of  chastity 
which  the  sanctions  of  our  society  tend  to  produce 
in  the  normal  young  man?  One  could  hardly  deny 
it.  Nor  could  one  deny  that  chastity  of  this  kind  is 
morally  not  worth  a  great  deal,  that  in  fact  it  is 
somewhat  despicable.  The  only  kind  that  has  any 
real  ethical  value  is  that  which  comes  naturally  as  a 
by-product  to  some  other  more  absorbing  passion  or 
interest.  Here  once  more  one  can  say  that  true  re- 
straint comes  not  from  the  checking  of  desire  but 
from  the  abundance  of  it;  not  from  any  denial  of  life, 
but  from  some  deeper  sense  of  life's  richness  and 
fulness.  However,  this  is  a  conclusion  from  the  gen- 
eral course  of  Anglo-Saxon  morals,  large  enough  to 
need  a  treatise  to  itself. 


76 


AU-DESSOUS  de  la  MELEE 

"Even  what  is  best  in  American  life  is  compulsory 
— the  idealism,  the  zeal,  the  beautiful  unison  of  its 
great  moments,"  writes  George  Santayana  in  his 
new  book,  "Character  and  Opinion  in  the  United 
States."  And  this  perceiving  and  discriminating 
critic  goes  on  to  imply  that  in  the  intellectual  life 
of  this  country,  too,  the  dice  of  thought  is  loaded; 
loaded  in  favour  of  Protestant  morality. 

Now,  in  spite  of  the  sound  justice  in  this  obser- 
vation— and  who  would  have  the  temerity  to  chal- 
lenge it? — the  chief  compulsion  in  our  intellectual 
life,  as  it  actually  exists  to-day,  might  be  described 
as  the  moral  obligation  to  be  optimistic.  In  a  pros- 
perous, expanding,  self-confident,  Western  civilisa- 
tion such  as  our  own,  this  unspoken  compulsion  has, 
of  course,  a  certain  utility-value.  The  tone  of  ordi- 
nary social  intercourse  could  hardly  rest  on  any  other 
set  of  assumptions  without  unsettling  the  whole 
fabric  of  relationships.  But  this  command  to  be 
optimistic  is  more  subtly  pervasive.  Art  and  litera- 
ture wither  in  too  persistently  fruitful  a  sun,  yet  in 
America  they  must  keep  for  ever  in  this  prosperous 
noon-day  glare.  Indeed,  it  is  becoming  necessary 
to  exert  considerable  imaginative  effort  even  to  en- 
visage the  free-functioning,  disinterested  intelligence 
or  the  curious  and  nonpartisan  sensibility,  responsive 
alike  to  grief  and  joy. 

77 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

Walking  through  any  of  the  chief  streets  of  New 
York  City  one  of  these  brilliant  October  days — by 
far  the  most  glorious  month  in  New  York's  calendar, 
when  the  very  air  is  electric  with  energy  and  life 
— one  finds  it  hard  to  think  of  a  man  deliberately 
cutting  himself  from  all  this  effulgence  of  life,  yet 
the  afternoon  newspapers  tell  of  MacSwiney's  death 
in  headline  after  headline  on  the  sun-flecked  stands. 
How  can  one  deliberately  die  when  there  are  these 
blue  waters  of  the  Hudson,  these  eager,  bright,  girl- 
ish forms,  the  towering  strength  of  these  buildings 
still  to  be  seen  and  responded  to?  It  is  like  sending  a 
funeral  cortege  through  a  carnival  street,  gay  with 
flags  and  bunting.  What  inner  light  serene  can  have 
the  power  to  make  all  these  physical  beauties  black 
and  miasmatic  beside  a  more  enduring  radiance? 
These  are  disturbing  questions  for  Americans.  We 
shrug  our  shoulders  and  walk  briskly  up  the  Avenue. 
Our  life  is  not  like  that;  we  have  so  many  things  to 
live  for,  so  many  fine  things. 

It  is  this  mood  we  seek  to  perpetuate  in  our  litera- 
ture and  our  art,  although  of  course  it  is  but  one 
mood  out  of  the  many  that  life  gives  us,  and  perhaps 
the  one  not  most  permanent.  No  matter;  our 
editors,  our  playwrights,  our  artists,  our  philos- 
ophers and  sociologists  must  keep  it  going,  must 
make  it  eternal.  It  is  the  mood  of  progress,  of 
idealism,  of  conviction  that  things  matter;  the  mood 
of  zealous  success.  It  is  the  American  intellectual 
compulsion,  strong  and  unquestioned.  Our  young 
men  from  college  come  into  the  world  with  an  opti- 
mistic  assumption   so  firmly   entrenched  that  even 

78 


AU-DESSOUS  de  la  MELEE 

senseless  war,  pestilence,  or  famine  could  hardly 
withstand  it.  It  is  a  kind  of  by-product  of  the  ma- 
terialistically triumphant  machine-era,  buttressed  by 
a  falsely  Darwinian  theory  of  the  inevitability  of 
progress,  flattered  by  the  philosophers,  secured  by 
the  naivete  of  a  youthful  people  still  certain,  not 
only  that  human  happiness  is  attainable,  but  actually 
existent.  That  is  why  the  Oriental,  with  his  implac- 
able Eastern  tolerance,  seems  to  have  a  curiously 
amused  expression  in  his  eyes  when  he  talks  to  us — a 
bit  as  if  he  were  talking  with  impetuous  children, 
who  were  yet  to  learn  the  vanity  of  all  things.  And 
he  smiles  even  broadly  when  he  reflects  that  Chris- 
tianity, in  essence  an  Eastern,  un-worldly  religion, 
is  officially  our  faith. 

Intellectually  speaking,  of  course,  there  are  no  a 
priori  reasons  to  justify  optimistic  conclusions  about 
the  world  we  live  in — or  pessimistic  either,  for  that 
matter.  It  is  a  question  of  the  evidence.  But  al- 
though the  one  sure  fact  in  life  is  death  and  dissolu- 
tion, the  bias  of  our  thought  is  always  conditioned 
by  the  will-to-live.  We  shrink  back  in  fright  from 
too  ruthless  a  view  of  our  own  frail  mortality;  we 
neglect  when  we  do  not  despise  the  man  who  would 
constantly  recall  it  to  us;  we  cling  with  pathetic 
eagerness  to  mystical  nostrums  and  superstitions 
that  assure  us  of  our  eternal  continuance.  We  dare 
not  face  the  prospect  of  annihilation. 

This  boundless  faith,  this  complacency  about  what 
life  has  to  offer  us,  naturally  comports  very  well  with 
the  physical  opportunities  of  our  existence.     It  rein- 

79 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

forces,  as  it  were,  our  national  prosperity.  It  makes 
for  clean  cities,  cheerful  countenances,  health.  Our 
very  funerals  are  pageants,  for  we  will  not  let  our- 
selves know  the  meaning  of  grief.  We  will  not  be- 
lieve that  sorrow  and  suffering  may  come  through 
any  other  agency  than  our  own  remedial  weaknesses; 
there  is  nothing  in  the  nature  of  the  world  itself  that 
makes  them  inevitable. 

But  art  and  literature  can  not  flourish  in  such  an 
atmosphere.  They  are  strange  flowers  that  can  not 
blossom  in  too  rich  a  soil,  nor  can  they  flourish  when 
the  soil  is  too  poor.  Our  American  soil  is  far  too 
rich;  it  can  produce  only  lush,  quick-growing,  quick- 
dying  vegetation.  Compare,  for  instance,  the  very 
best  of  our  serious  novels  with,  say,  Dostoievsky's 
"Possessed,"  or  "Crime  and  Punishment"  (books, 
by  the  way,  which  the  younger  generation  of  Amer- 
ican writers  seems  just  to  be  discovering.)  It  is  as 
if  we  had  been  living  only  half  a  life;  we  are  sud- 
denly taken  au-dessous  de  la  melee,  as  it  were,  to  the 
rich,  dim,  uncertain,  fantastic  world — but  none  the 
less  real — underlying  that  of  the  ordinary,  thin  crust 
of  everyday  consciousness.  It  is  a  world  where  the 
values  we  most  cling  to  in  public  become  utterly 
meaningless;  where  pain  has  an  introspective  value; 
sorrow,  a  perceptive  illumination  of  experience  which 
make  their  cost  disproportionate  to  their  intrinsic 
worth. 

But  our  own  literature  and  art  have  not  yet  ceased 
to  be  in  the  battle ;  they  have  not  yet  learned  how  to 
get  below  the  surface  of  things.     Nor  will  they 

80 


AU-DESSOUS  de  la  MELEE 

until  our  optimistic  compulsion  has  been  destroyed, 
until  in  the  world  of  the  spirit  and  of  the  mind  we 
find  that  there  is  one  moral  obligation  and  only  one : 
to  tell  the  truth  as  we  honestly  see  and  feel  it.  Then 
only  will  our  intellectual  life  be  truly  free. 


81 


COMMON  SENSE  About 
FRANCE 

One  of  the  saddest  results  of  any  new  interna- 
tional alliance  is  the  propaganda-literature  which  in- 
evitably accompanies  the  diplomatic  marriage. 
Something  of  the  sort  was  discernible  in  England  as 
early  as  the  beginnings  of  the  Entente,  back  in  King 
Edward's  time.  From  despising  French  characteris- 
tics, popular  sentiment  swung  over  to  imitating  them, 
ending,  when  the  war  came,  in  positive  adulation;  as 
Mr.  Dell  says,  "frivolous"  and  "immoral"  France 
became  "a  sort  of  hermaphrodite  deity  made  up  of 
Joan  d'Arc  and  M.  Clemenceau."  But  this  change 
of  opinion  was  mild  compared  with  the  violent  up- 
rooting of  old  prejudices  and  the  complacent  ignor- 
ance of  France  when  we  ourselves  entered  the  war. 
On  the  French  side,  the  worst  kind  of  chauvinist 
propagandists — M.  Bergson  is  a  case  in  point — al- 
though, as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  is  not  fundamentally 
French  in  his  point  of  view — were  sent  to  America 
to  convince  us  of  the  eternal  justice  of  her  cause,  and 
in  spite  of  a  few  temporary  aberrations  about  French 
militarism  and  the  like,  they  seem  to  have  captured 
Mr.  Wilson  securely.  On  our  side,  equally  stupid 
and  uninformed  publicists  and  journalists  invaded 
the  coasts  of  our  unsuspecting  ally,  and  sent  home 
glowing  accounts  of  la  belle  France  and  the  immortal 
poilu.    Camouflage  became  a  popular  word.    Then, 

.82 


COMMON  SENSE  About  FRANCE 

without  mercy,  came  the  books — histories  of  France, 
explanations  of  the  Alsace-Lorraine  quarrel,  the 
deep-dyed  villainy  of  M.  Cailloux,  the  martial  vigour 
of  the  Frenchman  coupled  with  a  complete  lack  of 
the  military  spirit,  feuilletons,  apologetics,  trav- 
elogues for  the  Chautauquas,  in  short,  a  very  de- 
pressing flood  of  print. 

Perhaps  all  the  more  depressing  since  although  it 
is  nowhere  more  difficult  to  make  two  races  under- 
stand each  other  than  when  introducing  Anglo- 
Saxons  and  Latins  to  each  other,  at  the  same  time  we 
most  need  to  know  the  better  qualities  of  the  French 
people.  Our  civilisation,  and  this  is  even  truer  of 
America  than  of  England,  can  learn  more  from 
France  than  from  almost  any  other  country.  Yet 
we  cannot  learn  anything  at  all  unless,  along  with 
our  being  made  acquainted  with  her  great  qualities, 
we  are  at  the  same  time  made  acquainted  with  her 
weaknesses.  In  this  respect,  indeed,  the  French  are 
particularly  open  to  misunderstanding.  The  first 
thing  to  learn  is  that  there  is  not  merely  one  homo- 
geneous France;  there  is  the  France  of  the  peasant, 
of  the  proletariat,  of  the  bourgeoisie.  And  there  is 
Paris  and  the  various  provincial  regions.  Not  only 
that,  in  the  individual  Frenchman  there  are  para- 
doxical opposites  which  are  extremely  hard  to  recon- 
cile :  for  example,  closeness,  even  stinginess,  side  by 
side  with  great  generosity;  high  intelligence,  scep- 
ticism, and  rationality,  coupled  with  a  rather  childish 
love  of  fine  phrases  and  the  tendency  to  run  after 
la  gloriole;  a  deep  contempt  for  politicians  coincident 
with  a  mystical  readiness  to  lay  down  one's  life  for 

83 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

la  pa  trie;  a  deep  conservatism  in  the  major  things 
along  with  a  fine  iconoclasm  towards  historical  tradi- 
tions and  what  are  known  in  other  countries  as  the 
conventions;  an  unerring  fineness  of  taste  in  artistic 
things  at  the  very  moment  when  they  shock  their 
Anglo-Saxon  brethren  by  a  frankness  at  the  facts  of 
life.  But  beneath  all  these  contradictions  run  two 
unending  streams  of  French  character,  intellectual 
sincerity  and  the  readiness  to  face  facts,  the  two 
points,  in  truth,  on  which  these  people  can  teach  us 
the  most.  Perhaps  nowhere  is  this  basic  French 
good  sense  better  illustrated  than  in  a  contrast  be- 
tween President  Wilson  and  M.  Clemenceau. 
Equally  with  the  President,  the  former  French 
Premier's  conception  of  la  victorie  was  sentimental 
and  romantic,  utterly  divorced  from  economic  reali- 
ties. But  when  it  was  all  over,  when  he  had  got 
what,  as  he  confessed,  he  had  waited  forty  years  to 
obtain,  did  the  French  Premier  indulge  in  rhodo- 
montade  about  the  heart  of  the  world  being  broken, 
if  the  treaty  were  not  immediately  ratified?  He  did 
not.  His  French  good  sense  reasserted  itself.  He 
coolly  stated  that  the  "victory"  was  only  a  Pyrrhic 
victory  after  all. 

I  know  of  no  recent  book  which  gives  a  better  pic- 
ture of  the  French  people  as  they  really  are,  both  of 
their  lovable  and  unpleasant  qualities,  nor  of  the 
economic  and  political  and  intellectual  life  of  present 
day  France  than  that  by  Mr.  Robert  Dell,  "My 
Second  Country." 

The  author  is  peculiarly  equipped  for  his  task. 
His  early  boyhood  love  for  France  led  him  in  time  to 

84 


COMMON  SENSE  About  FRANCE 

make  it  his  second  country,  and  for  many  years  he 
was  the  Paris  correspondent  of  the  Manchester 
Guardian,  which  post  he  held  during  the  war  almost 
to  the  end,  when  his  exposure  of  the  Austrian  peace 
offer  of  19 17  made  him  persona  non  grata  to  M. 
Clemenceau,  who  was  instrumental  in  bringing  about 
his  expulsion,  which  now  will  probably  soon  be — if 
it  has  not  already  been — rescinded.  He  is  thor- 
oughly acquainted  with  all  classes  of  French  people, 
and  those  impulsive  critics  who  have  taken  umbrage 
at  some  of  his  strictures  on  French  institutions  and 
methods  ought  to  recall  his  own  words  in  his  intro- 
duction to  this  book: 

The  more  I  know  the  French  people  the  fonder  I  become 
of  them.  Like  all  human  beings,  they  have  the  defects  of 
their  qualities,  but  they  have  one  quality  which  makes  them 
the  most  charming  people  in  the  world  to  live  with — they 
understand  the  art  of  living. 

Mr.  Dell's  criticisms  spring  not  from  malice  but 
from  deep  affection  and  from  the  desire  to  see  the 
best  in  French  life  endure;  possibly,  also,  from  an 
honesty  before  facts  which  sooner  or  later  comes  to 
be  second  nature  with  all  who  spend  many  years 
among  the  French  people.  Yet  this  temperamental 
sympathy  and  intelligent,  discriminating  liking,  are 
not  his  only  equipment.  He  has  as  well  enormous 
intellectual  vitality;  his  style  is  of  firm  texture — one 
feels  he  would  be  an  incomparable  raconteur — and 
has  acquired  something  of  the  incisive  clarity,  com- 
bined with  subtlety  and  wit,  so  characteristic  of  the 
best  French  prose.     He  can  be  gay  without  being 

85 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

meaninglessly  vivacious,  and  profoundly  critical 
without  being  portentous.  For  example,  discussing 
the  fact  that  the  majority  of  French  Catholics  are 
not  really  religious  in  spirit  at  all,  but  look  upon  the 
Church  as  a  convenient  social  and  political  institu- 
tion (in  later  years,  unhappily  as  the  best  ally  of 
reaction),  he  remarks: 

The  Franciscans  in  the  Middle  Ages  started  the  convenient 
theory  that  one  heard  mass  in  a  Franciscan  church,  if  one 
arrived  before  the  fIte,  missa  est/  with  which  it  concludes, 
and  thereby  filled  their  churches  to  the  detriment  of  the 
parish  churches  and  the  indignation  of  the  secular  clergy. 
This  theory  must  still  have  partisans  in  France,  for  on  any 
Sunday  morning  one  may  see  large  numbers  of  men  arriving 
at  the  Madeleine  just  before  the  end  of  the  eleven  o'clock 
High  Mass.  They  wait  at  the  bottom  of  the  church  to 
watch  the  women  go  out,  and  very  agreeable  acquaintances, 
I  am  told,  have  often  been  made  in  this  way.  The  English 
Catholic  is  a  very  different  person  from  the  Catholic  of  a 
Catholic  country:  he  takes  the  whole  thing  seriously,  as 
iEneas  Piccolomini  (afterwards  Pius  II)  said  with  con- 
temptuous pity  of  the  Irish  of  his  day.  The  Catholic  of  a 
Catholic  country — at  any  rate  in  France  and  Italy — is  al- 
ways exercising  his  ingenuity  to  sail  as  near  the  wind  as 
possible — to  get  around  the  laws  of  the  Church  or  to  dis- 
cover the  least  that  he  can  possibly  do  to  comply  with  them. 
He  has  the  valuable  aid  of  the  moral  theologians,  who  have, 
for  instance,  decided  in  France  that  a  water-fowl  is  fish  and 
may,  therefore,  be  eaten  on  a  day  of  abstinence.  So  the 
wealthy  French  Catholic,  whose  delight  it  is  to  dine  as 
sumptuously  as  he  possibly  can  on  a  Friday  without  break- 
ing the  laws  of  the  Church,  eats  wild  duck  with  a  clear 
conscience. 

Politically,  Mr.  Dell  is  a  Socialist,  but  this  classi- 
fication should  be  taken  with  reservations.  Nothing 
is  more  confusing  to  the  foreign  observer  in  France 

86 


COMMON  SENSE  About  FRANCE 

than  the  various  political  divisions;  one  ought,  in- 
deed, to  be  provided  with  an  advance  terminology 
before  attempting  to  pass  judgment,  and  Mr.  Dell 
furnishes  this  in  his  excellent  chapter,  "Socialism, 
Syndicalism,  and  State  Capitalism."  The  latter 
term,  indeed  is  what  is  called  in  France  and  Belgium 
etatisme,  for  which  no  adequate  English  word  exists. 
The  French  from  their  sad  experience  with  State 
monopolies — tobacco,  matches,  the  postal  service, 
purchase  of  the  Western  Railway — are  disillusioned 
about  the  kind  of  nationalisation  which  would  be 
under  the  control  of  a  government  bureaucracy; 
monopolies  are  in  essence  the  same  whether  under 
capitalistic  or  socialistic  control;  they  have  the  con- 
sumer at  their  mercy  and  end  inevitably  in  economic 
slavery.  It  was  partly  the  result  of  the  experience 
with  State  monopolies,  partly  disgust  with  parlia- 
mentary palliative  reforms,  which  led  to  the  Syndi- 
calist revolt  in  France — in  Mr.  Dell's  opinion  a 
healthy  corrective  of  mere  parliamentarianism  and 
a  step  in  the  right  direction  towards  preparing  the 
proletariat  to  use  power  "if  and  when  it  could  get  it." 
Syndicalism,  in  a  word,  can  never  come  to  terms  with 
State  Socialism,  but,  according  to  this  author,  "its 
differences  with  Revolutionary  Socialism  are  entirely 
concerned  with  questions  of  method  and  can  easily 
be  adjusted  especially  now  when  the  majority  of 
Socialists  in  France  have  abandoned  all  hope  of 
effecting  anything  important  by  parliamentary 
action." 

This  contempt  of  parliamentary  methods  arises 
not  merely  from  scepticism  about  political  democ- 

87 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

racy,  but  as  much  from  the  stupidity  of  the  bour- 
geoisie which  exercises  an  administrative  dictator- 
ship, increasingly  galling  not  alone  to  the  city  prole- 
tariat but  as  well  to  the  peasant  who  more  and  more 
must  find  that  a  policy  of  protection,  favouring  the 
farmers,  will  not  enable  him  in  the  long  run  to  com- 
pete with  foreign  agricultural  competition  on  modern 
lines.  The  scandal  of  import  duties  on  food  when 
France  cannot  produce  enough  for  herself  cannot 
last  forever.  Yet,  as  Mr.  Dell  admits  in  his  chapter, 
"Small  Property  and  Its  Results,"  it  is  still  doubtful 
in  case  of  a  revolution  whether  the  peasant  would 
throw  his  influence  on  the  side  of  the  proletariat 
rather  than  the  bourgeoisie.  In  the  latter  class  our 
author  finds  the  real  hope  of  a  revolution  which  will 
unseat  the  present  bourgeois  dictatorship  as  the  old 
ancien  regime  was  upset  when  it  blindly  refused  to 
make  the  necessary  concessions.  Indeed,  in  Mr. 
Dell's  opinion  it  is  doubtful  if  any  concessions  now 
can  save  the  bourgeoisie;  France  is  rushing  headlong 
to  financial  bankruptcy,  if  the  present  policy  of  mili- 
tary expansion  and  attempt  to  make  France  a  great 
industrial  nation  is  persisted  in — as  it  unfortunately 
seems  to  be  persisted  in.  Of  course  one  does  not 
have  to  agree  with  all  this,  but  it  is  a  relief  to  have 
the  facts  put  so  cogently  and  to  find  a  writer  who  is 
not  afraid  to  risk  his  intellectual  reputation  by  stat- 
ing what  he  considers  to  be  the  possibilities.  At  all 
events,  the  reader  is  given  ample  material  to  make 
his  own  judgments. 

But  whatever  one's  agreement  or  disagreement 
with  Mr.  Dell  politically  or  economically,  there  will 


COMMON  SENSE  About  FRANCE 

be  few  to  challenge  his  cultural  judgment.  The  true 
France,  he  says  echoing  the  words  of  their  greatest 
writer  of  the  19th  century,  is  the  France  of  Voltaire 
and  Montesquieu,  the  sceptical,  the  rationalist,  the 
anti-religious,  the  intellectualistic  France.  France 
may  have  her  romantic  reactions — her  Rousseaus 
and  Chateaubriands  and  her  modern  Bergsons  and 
mystics — but  she  always  goes  back  to  the  older  tra- 
dition. With  the  disillusion  resulting  from  the  war 
and  the  ensuing  peace,  the  younger  France  is  ready 
for  a  rationalistic  revival.  "  77  le  faut,  tu  ne  sauras 
pas'  say  religion  and  patriotism.  They  reply:  'We 
will  not;  we  will  know.'  "  And  if  that  spirit  con- 
quers, France  may  yet  return,  repudiating  her  pres- 
ent leaders,  to  her  true  role — the  leader  and  the 
originator,  in  the  Western  world,  of  civilised  ideas 
and  the  art  of  living. 


89 


OVERDONE 

London,  6  Aug. — According  to  the  latest  information  the 
British  Government  has  accepted  the  Bolshevik  note  in- 
sisting on  a  separate  peace  with  Poland  and  promising  to 
attend  the  London  conference  subsequently  on  the  condi- 
tions they  have  laid  down.  The  truth  is,  Premier  Lloyd 
George  had  no  option,  for  any  proposal  to  go  to  war  for 
the  Poles  against  Russia  would  have  been  repudiated  by  the 
country.  The  I^abour  party,  to  make  sure  no  such  enter- 
prise can  be  undertaken,  has  summoned  an  urgent  confer- 
ence of  trades-union  and  other  bodies  to  meet  in  London 
Monday,  and  in  the  meantime  has  issued  a  manifesto  pro- 
testing in  the  strongest  terms  against  the  support  of  Poland. 
— From  the  New  York  World,  7  August,  1920. 

With  one  suggestive  aspect  of  this  dispatch — the 
frank  assumption  regarding  the  location  of  power, 
even  political  power,  in  the  modern  State — we  are 
not  here  concerned.  There  is  another  equally  sug- 
gestive aspect.  This  news-item  is  not  hidden  away 
in  an  obscure  corner  of  the  paper,  nor  is  it  under  a 
correspondent's  signature,  when  a  certain  margin  of 
editorial  interpretation  of  the  news  is  considered  ad- 
missible. It  is  an  anonymous  "straight"  news-item 
printed  on  the  first  page,  right  hand  edge  or  feature- 
column.  It  is  not  a  dispatch  recording  the  specific 
words  of  unimportant  foreign  ministers  or  obscure 
but  hopeful  Generals.  It  is  meant  to  be  a  simple 
statement  of  the  actual  facts,  without  propaganda- 
bias  one  way  or  the  other.  It  is  meant  to  be  report- 
ing and  nothing  but  reporting.     The  World  did  not 

90 


OVERDONE 

shudder  with  editorial  horror  at  this  perverse  affec- 
tion of  the  mass  and  file  of  British  labour  for  the  suc- 
cess of  the  Bolsheviki  against  Poland  and  bury  the 
dispatch  beneath  department  store  advertisements — 
it  set  it  down  as  a  fact,  and  as  an  important  fact. 
In  this  instance  at  all  events,  whatever  the  editors  of 
the  newspapers  may  have  thought,  they  conceived  of 
their  function  as  one  of  giving  their  readers  the  news. 
They  went  on  the  democratic  assumption  that  their 
readers  could  form  their  own  opinions  for  themselves 
if  they  wanted  to.  They  evidently  suspected  that  the 
public  might  be  somewhat  tired  of  propaganda. 

The  truth  is,  the  public  is  extremely  tired  of  it. 
Propaganda  has  been  overdone.  It  has  been  so  much 
overdone  that  even  those  who  would  most  like  to 
employ  it  are  somewhat  dubious  of  its  efficiency  at  the 
present  moment.  Nothing  could  be  more  amusing 
or  naive  than  many  of  the  special  dispatches  from 
Washington  of  the  same  week  in  which  this  dispatch 
was  printed.  The  hard  facts  of  the  situation  are 
that  the  bulk  of  people  in  the  United  States  are 
heartily  sick  of  Europe  and  all  its  works  at  the 
present  time;  that,  ostrich-like  as  it  may  be  (as  a  few 
excited  bankers  are  trying  now  to  convince  us),  they 
would  like  to  forget  the  late  affray  and  get  back  as 
far  as  possible  "to  normal,"  that  the  sending  of 
troops  to  Poland  on  a  large  scale  "is  unthinkable." 
The  people  of  the  country  are  not  the  least  little  bit 
frightened  by  the  "menace  of  bolshevism"  at  the 
present  moment.  The  menace  of  the-  Hun  was  so 
overworked  during  the  war,  the  menace  of  the  Red 
was  so  far  overdone  during  the  year  following  the 

91 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

armistice,  that  it  takes  a  powerful  lot  of  preparation 
and  publicity  to  start  any  new  menace  as  a  going  con- 
cern. This  is  distressing  to  the  statesmen  at  the 
head  of  the  Government,  embarrassing  in  fact.  "The 
preservation  of  the  Polish  independence,"  says  a 
dispatch  from  Washington  to  the  New  York  Times 
of  7  August,  "is  the  immediate  concern  of  President 
Wilson  and  his  principal  advisers.  But  they  are  em- 
barrassed by  their  inability  to  take  any  positive  action 
that  will  turn  the  scales  in  Poland's  favour."  "Em- 
barrassed" is  eminently  correct.  In  one  sense,  it  is 
literally  true  as  one  Associated  Press  item  of  that 
week  stated,  that  the  peril  to  civilisation  is  greater 
to-day  than  in  August,  19 14;  but  oddly  enough  the 
people  of  America  cannot  seem  to  get  at  all  het  up 
about  it. 

What  the  gigantic  intellects  who  are  running  the 
foreign  affairs  of  this  nation  have  unwittingly  stum- 
bled over  is  a  law  which,  in  the  psychology  of  sensa- 
tion, is  generally  known  as  the  law  of  diminishing 
returns.  Apply  a  strong  stimulus  frequently  and  the 
reaction  to  it  becomes  progressively  weaker;  apply  it 
long  enough,  and  all  reaction  disappears.  Indeed, 
when  pushed  a  I'outrance,  it  suddenly  induces  a  re- 
action the  exact  opposite  of  what  normally  is  to  be 
expected.  In  America,  the  menace-stimulus  has  been 
applied  about  to  a  point  where  almost  all  reaction 
has  disappeared;  in  France,  in  England,  but  above 
all  in  Italy  it  has  been  laid  on  so  generously  that  the 
present  reaction  of  the  mass  and  file  of  those  re- 
spective nations  has  undergone  the  inevitable  psy- 
chological transformation   from  terror  to  positive, 

92 


OVERDONE 

affection.  In  their  enthusiasm  at  what  they  thought 
to  have  discovered  as  the  infinite  docility  and  sug- 
gestibility of  the  mob,  the  propaganda-experts  of  the 
modern  political  Governments  lost  sight  of  the  sound 
old  Greek  maxim  that  to  be  continuously  effective, 
what  is  necessary  is  moderation  in  all  things.  But 
they  have  been  intemperate  in  their  stirring  up  of 
hate,  and  are  beginning  to  pay  the  penalty.  They 
might  have  learned  a  lesson  from  the  French  Revolu- 
tion but  they  did  not.  They  might  have  remembered 
that  the  excessive — and  necessary — loving  of  every 
citizen,  those  curious  comrade-festivals  in  Paris 
where  every  one  fell  on  every  one  else's  neck  and 
wept  from  sheer  unadulterated  affection,  were  the 
inevitable  preliminary  to  the  Terror  and  the  guillo- 
tine. The  publicity  hate-experts  made  fools  of  them- 
selves during  the  war  and  after,  and  the  present 
benefit  inures  to  Lenin  and  Trotsky.  These  latter, 
indeed,  seem  to  have  been  extremely  wary  of  falling 
into  the  same  trap  themselves,  for  whenever  their 
more  excitable  apostles  in  other  countries  have  too 
loudly  sung  the  praises  of  the  Bolshevik  regime  they 
have  adroitly  contrived  to  put  on  the  soft  pedal  with 
rather  a  severe  dose  of  unpleasant  facts.  They  seem 
to  have  sensed  that  nothing  would  be  ultimately  more 
damaging  to  their  prestige  than  a  too  rosy  pic- 
ture of  Utopia  by  their  idolaters  in  other  lands. 

Yet  this  practical  revelation  that  there  are  psycho- 
logical limitations  to  one  kind  of  propaganda,  when 
overdone,  gives  no  warrant  whatever  for  sentimental 
optimism  about  the  native  good  sense  of  the  masses 
of  people.    Common  sense  still  remains  the  most  un- 

93 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

common  thing  in  the  world;  only  geniuses  seem  to» 
have  a  permanent  monopoly  of  it.  What  has  been 
revealed  is  that  propaganda,  to  work  all  the  time,  has 
to  be  more  sophisticated  and  skilful  than  the  kind 
employed  by  the  crude  paid  attorneys  of  the  Allied 
nations  and  America.  There,  too,  they  may  have  to 
take  a  lesson  in  method  from  Moscow.  The  present 
state  of  affairs  does  not  reveal  that  propaganda  per 
se  is  ineffective,  but  only  that  it  demands  a  subtler 
technique  than  customarily  displayed.  In  a  contest 
of  wits  in  this  matter  the  Bolsheviki  may  win;  indeed, 
at  the  present  time,  they  seem  in  a  fair  way  of  doing 
just  that.  For  they  have  learned  the  great  practical 
advantage  of  letting  their  opponents  overdo  things. 
From  the  humanistic  point  of  view  this  present 
propaganda-battle  has  certain  amusing  aspects.  But 
the  ultimate  danger  goes  much  deeper.  It  is  no 
genuine  comfort  that  here  in  America  for  example 
the  great  mass  of  people  are  really  sick  to  death  of 
idealistic  phrases,  and  are  suspicious  of  all  "hate- 
drives."  This  is  merely  the  indifference  of  exhausted 
gullibility.  It  is  a  fact  that  what  we  know  as  West- 
ern civilisation  is  in  the  crucible;  that  it  actually  may 
be  destroyed  within  this  generation,  as  it  rapidly  is 
being  destroyed  in  certain  parts  of  Central  Europe 
to-day.  It  seems  also  a  fact  to  us,  even  if  Orientals 
might  plausibly  look  quizzical,  that  Western  civilisa- 
tion has  built  up  certain  graciousnesses,  expanded 
certain  humane  traditions,  developed  certain  cultural 
amenities,  which  it  would  be  a  pity  to  have  swept 
away  in  a  bitter  civil  war  over  economic  adjustment. 
But  we  are  so  tired  of  propaganda  and  lies  and  par- 

94 


OVERDONE 

tisanship,  so  sick  of  newspaper-filth,  that  we  prefer 
to  avoid  looking  at  the  facts,  prefer  to  be  sceptical 
of  all  attempts  at  assessment.  If  we  were  not  the 
victims  ot  six  years  of  just  this  kind  of  propaganda- 
battle,  we  should  be  busy  thinking  over  our  own 
civilisation,  trying  and  assessing  it,  searching  for  its 
genuine  values.  We  should  be  busy  devising  ways 
and  means  of  preserving  what  we  then  thought  might 
bear  the  ultimate  test  of  the  disinterested  mind. 
Instead  we  are  just  drifting,  letting  the  blind  forces 
of  events  carry  us  where  it  will,  even  if  it  be  to 
destruction. 

For  the  one  important  loss  of  the  war  and  the 
peace  has  been  the  loss  of  our  greatest  spiritual 
possession,  intellectual  integrity.  We  have  so  poi- 
soned the  environment  that  only  the  cynic  or  the  paid 
attorney  can  survive  without  too  great  difficulty. 
The  command  now  is,  be  indifferent  to  everything 
or  be  paid  by  somebody.  We  do  not  want,  we  do  not 
welcome,  we  shall  shortly  cease  even  to  understand, 
the  disinterested  mind.  We  suspect,  and  for  the  most 
part  rightly  suspect,  everybody  of  having  some  secret 
axe  to  grind.  We  take  nobody  at  his  face  value. 
We  smell  an  ulterior  purpose  in  everything.  We 
have  arranged  things  so  that  very  soon  intellectual 
integrity  will  become  a  positive  disability,  and  the 
person  possessing  it  a  fit  subject  for  the  psychopathic 
ward.  This  is  a  mood  far  worse  than  active  intoler- 
ance or  positive  error.  It  is  a  mood  of  low  intel- 
lectual vitality;  it  is  the  aftermath  of  six  years  of 
overdoing. 


95 


A  DILAPIDATED  SCARECROW 

There  is  sound  good  sense  in  Mr.  Owen  Wister's 
plea  that  Americans  forget  to  be  self-righteous  in 
judging  England;  after  all  it  is  a  trifle  absurd  for  us 
to  call  her  a  land-grabber  with  our  own  treatment  of 
the  native  Indians  and  Mexicans  a  matter  of  histori- 
cal record,  and  with  our  petty  South  American  im- 
perialisms to  mock  all  our  fine  pretensions  about  self- 
determination.  There  is  also  sound  good  sense  in  his 
plea  that  we  should  remember  that,  except  for  a  few 
misunderstandings — such  as  during  the  Civil  War 
and  the  war  of  1812,  England  has  generally  stood 
on  our  side  in  international  quarrels,  not,  as  Mr. 
Wister  himself  is  careful  to  point  out,  because  she 
loved  us  more,  but  because  she  loved  other  nations 
less.  Yet  in  saying  this  much  about  Mr.  Wister's 
new  book,  "A  Straight  Deal  or  The  Ancient 
Grudge,"1  one  has  said  about  all  that  can  be  said  in 
favour  of  it.  And  even  these  two  very  sensible  ob- 
servations of  Mr.  Wister's  are  irrelevant  to  the  cen- 
tral problem — the  problem  of  how  an  Anglo-Ameri- 
can war,  the  likelihood  of  which  is  treated  all  too 
frivolously  by  contemporary  journalism,  can  be 
avoided. 

It  is  quite  true  we  have  nothing  to  be  particularly 
self-complacent  about  when  we  compare  ourselves 

1KA  Straight  Deal,  or  The  Ancient  Grudge."  Owen  Wister. 
New  York.    The  Macmillan  Company. 

96 


A  DILAPIDATED  SCARECROW 

with  England;  in  fact,  when  we  survey  the  domestic 
scene  in  both  countries  to-day  the  balance  in  favour 
of  a  tolerable  civilisation  inclines  sharply  towards 
England.  The  vivid  realisation  of  this  unpleasant 
truth  does  not,  however,  help  matters  a  particle. 
However  much  intelligent  people  in  both  countries 
may  understand  their  own  nation's  defects  and  how- 
ever much  the  late  war  may  have  created  a  bond  of 
sympathy  between  snobbish  Americans — like  the 
author  of  this  book,  and  upper-class  Englishmen — 
the  common  people  of  England  and  of  the  United 
States  remain  densely  ignorant  of  each  other.  The 
contacts  of  the  late  war  did  nothing  to  improve  their 
comprehension;  Mr.  Wister  himself  must  be  acutely 
aware  of  this,  otherwise  he  would  not  have  written 
this  hysterical  and  rather  silly  book.  In  a  word,  the 
great  majority  of  the  populations  of  both  countries 
still  remains  exploitable  material  for  war,  and  the 
fondness  of  Mr.  Wister  for  English  manners  and  the 
admiration  of  the  New  York  Times  for  the  mentality 
of  Lord  Curzon  will  have  no  more  ultimate  effect 
on  the  course  of  events  than  the  amenities  exchanged 
between  the  Kaiser  and  the  late  King  Edward  dur- 
ing their  friendly  visits  before  the  war  had  on 
Anglo-German  relations. 

England  to-day  is  an  expanded  imperialism,  and 
in  the  nature  of  things  we  have  become  a  rapidly  ex- 
panding one.  Unless  imperialism  is  killed  at  its 
source  in  both  countries,  a  conflict  of  interests  must 
inevitably  develop,  and  our  common  language  and 
common  traditions,  upon  which  Mr.  Wister  lays  so 
much  sentimental  emphasis,  will  only  serve  to  give 

97 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

that  conflict  fratricidal  fury.  Confronted  with  this 
situation,  the  author's  counsel  is  worse  than  nega- 
tive. It  is  well  enough  to  ask  us  to  bury  the  hatchet, 
but  supposing  the  hatchet  refuses  to  stay  buried?  It 
is  well  enough  to  ask  us  to  condone  England's  actions 
toward  Ireland  and  to  sing  the  praises  of  Ulster, 
but  supposing  civil  war  develops  within  the  British 
Empire  over  the  Irish  question?  It  may  be  granted 
that  we  are  perfectly  willing  on  both  sides  to  let  the 
past  bury  its  dead,  but  events  are  developing  inexor- 
ably in  spite  of  all  this  fine  display  of  goodwill,  and 
we  in  this  country  will  sooner  or  later  be  forced, 
whether  we  like  it  or  not,  to  adopt  a  definite  policy 
towards  them.  We  can  not  neglect  the  facts  of  Brit- 
ish imperialism  any  more  than  we  can  neglect  the 
facts  of  our  own.  It  is  not  that  Mr.  Wister  neglects 
these  facts,  it  is  merely  that  he  has  nothing  to  sug- 
gest— or  rather  that  he  has  only  one  thing  to  sug- 
gest, and  that  suggestion  is  pitifully  childish.  He 
implies  that  perpetual  fear  and  perpetual  hatred  of 
Germany  should  forever  bind  the  people  of  the 
United  States  to  the  people  of  the  British  Empire, 
and  that  whatever  differences  might  develop  between 
us  should  be  composed  in  the  face  of  the  common 
enemy. 

To  put  it  bluntly,  Mr.  Wister  has  far  to  go  be- 
fore he  recovers  from  the  panic  psychology  of  the 
war,  and  British  Tories  could  ask  for  no  better 
propagandist  than  this  honest  and  simple  soul  who 
seems  still  to  regard  the  threat  of  the  spread  of 
German  Kultur  as  the  supreme  menace  to  the  civil- 
ised world.    For  the  myth  of  the  rampant  German 

98 


A  DILAPIDATED  SCARECROW 

devil  is  well  understood  by  English  imperialists,  even 
if  it  is  not  by  Mr.  Wister,  as  a  first-class  dust-raiser 
to  hide  unpleasant  things  going  on  in  India,  Egypt, 
Mesopotamia,  Ireland,  and  other  sections  of  the 
globe  where  the  beneficent  authority  of  the  British 
Colonial  Office  holds  sway.  Mr.  Wister  is  the  vic- 
tim of  economic  innocence  and  of  a  sincere  admira- 
tion, which  does  him  credit,  for  English  civilisation. 
But  the  world  of  modern  imperialism,  modern 
labour,  modern  industrial  exploitation  seems  to  exist 
for  him  scarcely  more  realistically  than  for  the 
youngster  at  Eton  thinking  only  of  boating  and 
cricket.  His  book  is  a  painful  confirmation  of  the 
growing  suspicion  that  in  the  interests  of  interna- 
tional peace  the  instinctively  academic  literary  mind 
should  be  forbidden  to  express  itself  on  political 
matters  on  pain  of  the  immediate  destruction  of  all 
it  has  ever  written. 


99 


BIGOTRY  and  CLASS- 
CONSCIOUSNESS 

Before  any  age  can  establish  a  fire-and-burglar- 
proof  claim  to  enlightenment,  it  ought  first  to  be  sure 
whether  it  has  really  done  away  with  obscurantism  or 
merely  altered  its  mode.  A  good  place  to  begin  in- 
quiry is  with  the  tacit  modern  assumption  that 
bigotry  belongs  to  the  dark  ages.  Because  religious 
toleration  seems  to  have  been  finally  won  for  man- 
kind, because  a  purely  religious  war  to-day  would 
be  an  anachronism,  it  is  generally  assumed  that 
whatever  our  defects  may  be,  bigotry  is  not  among 
them.  We  may  be  guilty  of  occasional  puritanical 
excesses,  but  everybody  recognises  and  laughs  at 
them.  There  may  be  a  few  fanatics,  a  few  cranks, 
a  few  bigots,  even,  amongst  us,  yes;  but  bigotry  as  a 
significant  force  within  society — this  is  not  of  the 
world  of  1921. 

It  is  a  dangerous  assumption.  The  deep  irrational 
impulses  in  men  making  for  bigotry  have  merely 
shifted  their  mode  of  attack.  The  bigot  is  to  be 
found  among  the  reactionaries,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  among  the  violent  revolutionists,  on  the  other. 
Between  them,  in  bitter  fact,  the  world  of  our  time  is 
being  led  to  as  deadly  and  wasteful  a  conflict  of  the 
classes  as  was  ever  produced  by  rival  religious  sects 
in  the  Middle  Ages;  and  from  what  we  have  already 
observed  of  the  clashes  of  the  Whites  and  the  Reds 

100 


BIGOTRY  and  CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS 

in  the  Europe  of  the  past  three  years  the  conclusion 
is  irresistible  that  this  modern  warfare  is  every  bit 
as  atrocious  and  as  dehumanising  as  any  of  the 
struggles  of  the  14th  or  15  th  centuries.  In  so  far 
as  religious  bigotry  has  been  abandoned,  we  appear 
only  to  have  transferred  its  force  to  what,  for  want 
of  a  better  name,  we  may  call  economic  bigotry; 
and  it  is  an  open  question  whether  the  latter  is  not 
more  inimical  to  the  peace  and  well-being  of  society 
as  a  whole. 

Happily  we  can  now  see,  from  our  good  vantage 
point  in  history  the  manner  in  which  religious  bigotry 
arose  and  the  manner  of  its  waning.  The  analogy 
between  its  rise  and  the  rise  of  modern  class-warfare 
is  very  striking;  the  suggestion  comes  spontaneously 
that  the  manner  of  its  disappearance  may  contain 
some  hints  for  our  own  increasingly  class-torn  society. 

Religious  bigotry  arose  because  men  denied  that 
they  had  common  ideals.  Not  to  believe  in  a  given 
essential  doctrine  was  not  merely  to  be  eccentric  in 
one's  theology,  it  was  to  put  oneself  outside  the  pale 
of  human  existence.  If  one  did  not  express  an  ideal 
in  the  established  mode  and  manner  of  a  sect,  your 
community  of  interest  in  the  ideal  itself  was  ignored 
or  denied.  This  is  the  characteristic  of  bigotry.  The 
simple,  obvious  idea  which  began  the  era  of  religious 
toleration  was  only  that  we  were  worshipping  the 
same  God,  some  under  one  name  and  form,  some 
under  another;  but  all  aspiring  to  essentially  very 
much  the  same  thing.  Men  suddenly  realised  that 
religiously  George  Gordon,  in  the  preface  to  one  of 
those  strange  volumes  of  confessions  that  show  how 

101 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

anxious  the  American  writer  is  to  explain  himself, 
remarks : 

We  flatter  ourselves  that  our  lives  are  interesting  .  .  . 
but  they  are  not.  Not  even  to  us,  if  I  am  to  believe  those 
who  make  our  novels.  I  appealed  to  some  thirty  to  tell  me 
of  their  doings,  their  ways  of  work  and  play;  and  the  an- 
swers with  few  exceptions  came  in  diverse  individual  words : 
There  is  nothing  to  tell.  Now  if  a  man  can  make  nothing 
out  of  himself  .  .  .  but  we  are  here  to  make  something  of 
ourselves,  for  the  joy  of  nations  and  the  good  of  humanity. 

It  would  not  have  proved  anything  if,  having  said 
that  they  could  make  nothing  of  themselves,  the  men 
who  make  our  novels  had  entered  into  no  further 
details:  one  might  then  have  been  able  to  imagine 
that  they  were  perhaps  hiding  a  light  under  their 
bushels.  But,  alas,  they  have  innocently  revealed 
their  heights  and  depths,  and  Mr.  Gordon  is  justified 
in  his  comment:  they  and  their  lives  are  dull,  dull, 
dull.  It  is  because  they  are  the  victims  of  ignorance, 
chiefly.  They  have  never  sufficiently  lived  into  the 
creative  life  to  know  its  satisfactions,  the  satisfaction 
of  registering  one's  individuality  in  the  midst  of  the 
herd,  of  making  one's  life  tell.  Otherwise  they  could 
never  have  been  bribed  by  the  herd's  rewards. 

The  darkness  that  enfolds  them — for  that  is  the 
heart  of  the  matter — is,  indeed,  Cimmerian.  Mrs. 
Atherton,  that  operatic  soul  who,  from  time  to  time, 
darts  across  the  American  horizon,  like  a  comet  run- 
ning amuck,  really  seems  to  believe  that  she  is  a 
great  genius:  how  can  she  help  it  when  no  one  has 
ever  effectively  told  her  that  she  is  not  one?  And 
think  of  Mr.  Rupert  Hughes !    Mr.  Hughes  recently 

102 


BIGOTRY  and  CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS 

began  an  autobiographical  sketch  with  a  vindication 
of  Henry  Fielding,  assuring  us  that  those  who  read 
Fielding  in  his  own  day  "took  him  as  a  mere  enter- 
tainer." Mr.  Hughes,  as  I  remember,  did  not  say  in 
so  many  words  that  he  was  another  Fielding,  but  he 
certainly  implied  it.  And  why  should  he  not  be  con- 
vinced of  it,  when  the  newspapers  are  always  telling 
him  how  patriotic  he  is?  Our  criticism  has  much  to 
answer  for:  indeed,  of  all  the  facts  of  our  life  that 
are  responsible  for  the  limbo  of  the  magazines,  our 
criticism  is  the  most  responsible.  May  one  mention 
two  or  three  instances  in  point?  The  author  of 
"Literature  in  the  Making,"  a  collection  of  reprinted 
interviews  with  various  popular  American  writers 
which  had  some  vogue  two  or  three  years  ago,  ob- 
served, referring  to  his  heroes,  in  the  preface : 

They  knew  that  through  me  they  spoke  ...  to  all  the 
literary  apprentices  of  the  country,  who  look  eagerly  for 
precept  and  example  to  those  who  have  won  fame  by  the 
delightful  labour  of  writing.  They  knew  that  through  me 
they  spoke  ...  to  the  critics  and  students  of  literature  of 
our  own  generation  and,  perhaps,  of  those  that  shall  come 
after  us.  How  eagerly  would  we  read,  for  instance,  an 
interview  with  Francis  Bacon  on  the  question  of  the  author- 
ship of  Shakespeare's  plays,  or  an  interview  with  Oliver 
Goldsmith  in  which  he  gave  his  real  opinion  of  Dr.  John- 
son, Garrick  and  Boswell!  A  century  or  so  from  now, 
some  of  the  writers  who  in  this  book  talk  to  the  world  may 
be  the  objects  of  curiosity  as  great. 

Why  should  Mr.  Rupert  Hughes  distinguish  between 
himself  and  Fielding  when  American  criticism  does 
not  do  so?  How,  when  this  is  the  normal  mode  of 
our  criticism,  can  American  writers  ever  discover 

103 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

what  the  literary  life  truly  is?  And  this  is  the 
normal  mode  of  American  criticism.  Glance,  for 
another  example,  at  Mr.  Grant  Overton's  preface  to 
"The  Women  Who  Make  Our  Novels" : 

An  effort  has  been  made  to  include  in  this  book  all  the 
living  American  women  novelists  whose  writing,  by  the 
customary  standards,  is  artistically  fine.  An  equal  effort 
has  been  made  to  include  all  the  living  American  women 
novelists  whose  writing  has  attained  a  wide  popularity. 
The  author  does  not  contend,  nor  will  he  so  much  as  allow, 
that  the  production  of  writing  artistically  fine  is  a  greater 
achievement  than  the  satisfaction  of  many  thousands  of 
readers. 

Which  is  the  greater  achievement,  a  paper  balloon  or 
a  dish  of  stuffed  peppers?  Why  is  a  mouse  when  it 
spins?  And  what  is  the  ethic  of  a  criticism  that  at 
once  confirms  the  barbarous  taste  of  the  public  and 
convinces  the  author  that  he  has  nothing  to  learn 
about  himself?  Mr.  Overton  had  two  birds  in  his 
bush,  and  he  has  killed  them  both  with  one  stone. 
And  criticism  is  supposed  to  be  the  art  of  bringing 
life! 

Limbo,  the  place  of  lost  souls;  the  world  of  the 
magazines,  of  this  accepted  American  literature  of 
ours,  is  nothing  else  or  less.  And  our  criticism  will 
continue  to  merit  contempt  until  it  develops  in  itself 
powers  of  redemption. 


104 


SCIENCE  and  COMMON  SENSE 

The  two  do  not  necessarily  go  together;  indeed,  it 
is  often  the  scientist  and  no  one  else  who  would  profit 
most  from  the  possession  of  that  assessing  and  dis- 
criminating quality  which,  since  antiquity,  has  been 
described  by  the  term  good,  or  common,  sense.  Even 
if  we  admit  that  the  late  war  was  hardly  worth  the 
price,  we  can  still  turn  to  excellent  account  some  of 
its  salutary  by-products,  and  one  of  the  most  salutary 
was  the  illuminating  discovery  that  scientists,  intel- 
lectuals, professors,  the  men  of  light  and  leading, 
were  fully  competent  to  make  just  as  big  fools  of 
themselves  as  the  less  learned  fry;  in  fact,  bigger. 
To  not  a  few  competent  observers  this  discovery  has 
been  extremely  painful,  and  some  of  them  have  gone 
so  far  as  to  suggest  that  the  world  would  be  better 
off  and  the  ordinary  man  considerably  happier,  if 
modern  education  were  thrown  overboard,  bag  and 
baggage.  Theoretically,  we  must  confess,  this  prop- 
osition has  considerable  attractiveness;  but  as  there 
is  small  chance  of  its  being  put  into  effect,  any  dis- 
cussion of  its  advantages  has  approximately  as  much 
value  as  a  nominating  speech  at  a  political  conven- 
tion. Whether  we  like  them  or  not,  we  have  got  to 
put  up  with  modern  science  and  modern  education, 
and  we  might  as  well  make  the  best  of  them.  Our 
chief  concern,  if  we  care  a  penny  about  any  genuine 

105 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

humanism,  is  to  see  to  it  that  we  are  not  frightened 
or  intimidated  by  them. 

For  the  truth  is  we  have  got  to  do  much  more  than 
merely  put  up  with  them.  Every  age  seems  to  have 
its  peculiar  measure  of  superstitions  and  follies,  and 
our  own  age,  which  we  may  make  roughly  coincident 
with  the  rise  of  machine-technology,  has  made  science 
a  fetish.  It  is  probably  true  that  the  Middle  Ages 
were  priest-ridden,  but  that  fact  gives  us  no  warrant 
for  looking  down  upon  them  with  pity.  We  are  a 
little  worse  off,  if  anything,  for  where  religious  big- 
otry has  collapsed  we  have  replaced  it  with  bigotry 
of  a  different  kind.  We  are  science-ridden;  and  it 
requires  no  great  powers  of  perception  to  see  that 
science  rampant — rampant  medicine  in  particular — 
is  every  bit  as  tyrannical,  and  is  considerably  more 
absurd  than  the  arrogant  religions  of  the  past.  As 
the  ordinary  man  of  all  times  and  ages  appears  to 
have  a  congenital  itch  for  something  or  somebody  he 
can  bow  down  to  and  reverence,  and  as  the  ordinary 
man  of  this  industrial  era  of  the  machine-shop  and 
the  motor-tractor  appears  to  have  found  it  increas- 
ingly difficult  to  bow  down  to  and  reverence  the  tribal 
god  of  a  pastoral  people  (Thorstein  Veblen  has 
adroitly  exposed  this  state  of  affairs),  he  has  selected 
science  for  his  ultimate  source  of  authority.  From 
the  point  of  view  of  efficiency,  increased  production, 
and  material  wealth  this  conversion  has  considerable 
to  be  said  in  its  favour,  but  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  humanist,  it  is  profoundly  disquieting;  pre- 
cisely because  it  is  more  humiliating  to  see  the  human 
soul  shiver  before  blue  prints,  laboratories,  and  tech- 

106 


SCIENCE  and  COMMON  SENSE 

nical  experts  than  to  see  it  shiver  before  a  God  of 
Vengeance  and  a  future  Hell.  Unfortunately  the 
war  did  not  cure  the  ordinary  man  of  this  habit. 
The  spectacle  of  the  scientist  judging  ultimate  and 
larger  questions  of  public  policy  with  every  bit  as 
much  recklessness  and  stupidity  as  he  himself,  has 
failed  to  impress  him. 

But  to  the  humanist  who  wishes  to  resist  the  con- 
temporary irrational  mob-fear  before  the  fetish  of 
science,  the  spectacle  does  suggest  certain  corrective 
reflections.  These  reflections  spring  really  from  a 
proper  understanding  and  definition  of  intelligence. 
Perhaps  the  saddest  of  popular  fallacies  is  that 
which,  for  want  of  a  better  name,  one  may  call  the 
compensatory  fallacy,  the  naive  belief  that  a  man 
may  be  genuinely  excellent  in  one  thing  and  horribly 
stupid  in  everything  else,  the  specialist  par  excellence, 
and  yet,  on  the  whole,  decidedly  merit  being  called 
an  intelligent  man.  This  is  an  age  of  specialisms, 
too  often  unrelated  specialisms,  and  there  is  even 
something  disreputable,  like  jack-of-all-trades,  in  the 
very  phrase,  "the  all-round  man,"  although  as  a  mat- 
ter of  fact  the  most  valid  definition  of  the  all-round 
man  would  be  the  intelligent  man.  For  the  hardest 
point  to  make  clear  to  the  popular  mind  is  that  above 
a  certain  minimum  point  specialisation  per  se  is  no 
criterion  of  intelligence  whatsoever;  that  a  man  may 
be  a  first-rate  specialist  in  a  particular  field  and  yet 
be  fundamentally  an  ignoramus. 

The  ordinary  citizen  seems  to  see  this  point  clearly 
enough  when  it  is  exemplified  in  such  a  case  as  that 
of  the  eight-year-old  Polish  boy  who  defeats  twenty 

107 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

French  chess  experts  simultaneously,  yet  who  longs 
to  ride  on  the  blue  pigs  at  the  fair  at  Neuilly.  But 
when  it  comes  to  the  professor,  or  the  instructor  with 
a  degree,  the  application  of  the  parallel  never  takes 
place.  Yet  the  bald  fact  is  that  our  universities 
shelter  many  well-crammed,  narrowly  disciplined,  ex- 
pert specialists  who  by  any  proper  intelligence-rating 
come  perilously  near  becoming  morons.  They  do 
incalculable  harm  to  the  impressionable  youths  who 
are  taught  by  them,  and  of  course  they  never  really 
advance  their  own  particular  field  by  original  work. 
One  of  the  most  important  problems  facing  modern 
university-administration  is  the  problem  of  prevent- 
ing these  essentially  unintelligent  men  from  getting 
technical  training. 

The  waste  of  intelligence  in  the  modern  world, 
the  misapplication  and  misuse  of  it,  the  fostering  of 
unintelligent  passivity,  is  really  appalling.  The  ratio 
of  the  highly  intelligent  to  the  less  intelligent  and 
merely  stupid,  is  roughly  one  to  ten;  the  real  problem 
of  modern  education  is  to  discover  ways  and  means 
to  make  that  ten  per  cent  get  the  technical  training. 
For  then,  being  intelligent  men  and  not  mere  special- 
ists, they  will  be  in  a  position  to  see  their  own  spe- 
cialty in  its  proper  perspective,  to  realise  that  its 
methodology  may  be  wholly  inapplicable  to  another 
set  of  facts,  to  relate  it  in  a  humanistic  way  to  the 
rest  of  the  body  of  knowledge.  All  first-rate  origi- 
nal, creative,  or  valuable  intellectual  work  is  done  in 
this  fashion  and  no  other. 

What  one  has  to  come  back  to  again  and  again  is 
the  simple  proposition  that  a  high  degree  of  intelli- 

108 


SCIENCE  and  COMMON  SENSE 

gence  means  a  high  power  of  correlation.  But  even 
this  statement  is  open  to  misunderstanding.  A  high 
degree  of  intelligence  is  not  merely  the  ability  to 
correlate  everything  in  terms  of  one  methodology; 
the  attempt  to  strait-jacket  all  the  facts  of  this  world 
and  the  next  in  terms  of  one  method  is  not  intelli- 
gence at  all,  it  is  merely  ingenuity.  It  is,  of  course, 
the  favourite  game  of  modern  philosophers,  but  a 
more  fundamentally  ignorant  body  of  men  than 
modern  philosophers  it  would  be  hard  to  find  in  a 
year's  travel.  To  correlate  means  strictly  that;  to 
put  in  intelligible  terms  the  relations  between  several 
sets  of  facts,  to  assess  a  number  of  different  method- 
ologies in  terms  of  common  sense  and  wide  judg- 
ment. It  is  no  accident  that  during  the  war  in  Eng- 
land— and  the  phenomenon  was  to  a  certain  extent 
paralleled  in  other  countries — the  physicists  and 
chemists  were  on  the  whole  intolerant  and  harsh  in 
their  attitude  toward  Germany  and  the  war  in  gen- 
eral, whereas  the  biologists,  the  botanists,  and 
anthropologists,  again  on  the  whole,  were  tolerant 
and  enlightened.  This  might  have  been  expected  al- 
most a  priori.  The  set  of  facts  with  which  chemists 
and  physicists  customarily  deal,  requires  a  much  less 
flexible  and  much  more  unimaginative  methodology 
than  the  set  of  facts  coming  within  the  range  of  those 
studying  living  organisms  and  human  beings.  Again 
in  modern  psychology,  without  attempting  to  raise 
any  thorny  epistemological  problems,  it  is  fairly  ob- 
vious to  common  sense  that  the  scientist  is  dealing 
with  two- essentially  different  sets  of  facts:  on  the  one 
side,  the  physiological  and  chemical  reactions  of  the 

109 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

human  body;  on  the  other,  the  life  of  consciousness 
to  which  these  reactions  are  so  intimately  related. 
Yet  much  unadulterated  balderdash  and  sophistical 
humbug  is  written  on  psychology,  just  because  of  the 
frantic  attempts  to  cram  both  sets  of  facts  within  the 
framework  of  one  methodology.  Unending  are  the 
disquisitions  on  consciousness  being  just  one  aspect 
of  "response"  seen  from  a  different  angle,  and  so  on. 
The  desire  for  a  monistic  view  in  a  jangled,  plural- 
istic world  must  be  very  deep  in  all  of  us;  for  it  can 
drive  even  intelligent  men  to  the  topmost  heights  of 
absurdity.  A  good  deal  of  modern  psychological 
writing  is  pathetic  proof  of  how  deep  that  desire  is. 
The  proposition  that  the  real  criterion  of  intelli- 
gence is  in  the  degree  of  power  of  correlation  is 
hardly  a  new  one;  but  it  needs  to  be  restated  with 
considerable  emphasis  just  now  when  science  was 
never  subdivided  into  so  many  specialisms  and  when 
we  have  allowed  the  perfectly  healthy  concept  of 
the  all-round  man  to  acquire  a  mysterious  stigma. 
Other  ages  were  more  sane.  Aristotle,  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  and  Shakespeare  were  probably  regarded  by 
their  contemporaries  as  fairly  level-headed,  all-round 
men;  yet  that  fact  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  tar- 
nished their  intellectual  reputation.  To-day  we  mock 
at  the  all-round  man  simply  because  it  is  so  devilishly 
difficult  to  be  one.  The  temptations  to  fly  off  into 
erratic  specialisation  are  too  multifarious  and  too 
compelling.  Yet  in  his  heart  no  one  knows  better 
than  the  scientist  himself  that  no  really  creative  work 
will  be  done  by  him  even  in  his  own  field  until  he 
can  rise  above  his  specialty  and  survey  it  objectively; 

no 


SCIENCE  and  COMMON  SENSE 

until,  in  a  word,  he  can  apply  common  sense  to  his 
technical  problem  when  the  technical  resources  are 
exhausted. 

The  humanist  has  a  perfectly  valid  case  for  his 
assertion  of  the  supremacy  of  the  all-round  point  of 
view;  and  never  ought  he  to  press  it  more  boldly 
than  to-day.  He  ought  not  to  be  timid  about  assert- 
ing that  if  a  man  has  learned  really  to  think  straight 
on  one  subject,  the  chances  are  ten  to  one  that  he 
will  think  straight  on  most  others,  for  the  essence  of 
thinking  straight  is  always  the  same.  Now,  more 
than  ever  before,  we  ought  to  be  especially  wary  of 
the  specialist  who  makes  an  egregious  ass  of  himself 
nearly  every  time  he  expresses  any  opinion  on  any 
subject  other  than  his  own.  It  is  an  odds  bet  that  if 
we  examined  such  a  person  more  carefully,  we  should 
find  that  in  his  specialty  he  was  doing  his  work  solely 
by  rote  and  formula ;  rote  that  he  has  unintelligently 
assimilated  and  formula  that  he  does  not  fully  com- 
prehend. 


in 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH 
FEELING 

Now  that  our  participation  in  the  amalgamated 
society  of  imperial  freebooters — otherwise  known  as 
the  League  of  Nations — seems  to  have  been  ad- 
journed sine  die,  the  present  is  a  salutary  time  for 
reflection  upon  certain  of  the  causes  of  anti-British 
feeling  in  America,  for  it  is  this  feeling  as  much  as 
anything  else,  which  is  responsible  for  the  present 
odd  state  of  affairs. 

A  great  deal  of  nonsense  has  been  talked  on  both 
sides  of  the  debate.  Some  people  afflicted  with  an 
over-romantic  imagination  see  the  white  race  com- 
mitting suicide  through  an  Anglo-American  war,  sim- 
ply because  so  many  of  our  doughboys,  after  billet- 
ing in  merry  England,  came  home  breathing  rage  and 
defiance  at  all  "lime-juicers."  Yet  even  these  roman- 
ticists are  considerably  nearer  to  reality  than  are  the 
timid  liberals,  who,  during  the  war,  prated  about  our 
liberties  and  independence  being  protected  by  the 
British  Fleet,  and  whose  chief  emotion,  when  any- 
thing like  a  "break"  with  England  was  suggested 
(whether  to  enforce  our  neutrality,  to  prevent  our 
mails  from  being  tampered  with,  or  what  not),  re- 
sembled that  of  a  child  afraid  to  go  home  in  the 
dark. 

In  general,  no  spectacle  is  more  amusing  than  the 
way  in  which  one  nation's  estimate  of  another  is 

112 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

formed  by  the  Artful  Dodgers  of  publicity,  but  in 
particular,  no  spectacle  is  more  pathetic  than  the 
fashion  in  which  we  and  the  British  learn  about  each 
other.  It  must  be  painfully  confusing  to  the  clerk 
of  Upper  Tooting  to  hear  alternate  voices  from 
America,  one  telling  him  that  he  is  the  Lord  of 
Creation,  and  the  other  that  he  is  the  Scum  of  the 
Earth.  It  is  almost  equally  confusing  to  the  good 
citizen  of  Terre  Haute,  Indiana,  to  receive  the  com- 
pliments graciously  enunciated  by  His  Royal  High- 
ness, the  Prince  of  Wales,  and  at  the  same  time  to 
learn  of  the  cheerful  yet  libelous  lucubrations  of  Mr. 
Horatio  Bottomley,  M.P. 

Now  the  truth  is,  neither  group  of  self-appointed 
leaders  of  public  opinion  represents  the  prosaic  facts. 
Both  the  'phobes  and  the  'philes  merely  add  to  the 
general  confusion  and  misunderstanding,  and  indeed 
— as  is  usually  the  habit  of  all  extreme  propagandists 
either  pro  or  anti — play  into  each  other's  hands  in 
doing  so.  To  those  who  can  rise  above  the  astig- 
matism of  editorial  opinion  it  ought  to  be  fairly  ob- 
vious that  the  anti-British  feeling  in  America  is 
traditional  and  runs  deep.  On  the  other  hand,  no  one 
can  be  long  in  England  without  becoming  aware  of 
the  islander's  almost  instinctive  feeling  of  superiority 
to  those  from  "the  States,"  and  as  for  Canada  the 
anti-American  attitude  of  most  Canadians  is  pro- 
verbial. 

Many  of  the  causes  of  this  ill-will  (on  both  sides) 
are  legitimate,  and  many  are  not.  I  have  no  desire 
to  pose  as  a  moral  censor,  and  point  out  which  is 
which — rather  I  shall  attempt  here  only  to  put  down 

113 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

the  facts,  with  as  little  personal  bias  as  possible. 
One  does  this  the  more  readily  inasmuch  as  a  true 
alliance  between  the  United  States  and  Great  Brit- 
ain, or  a  union  with  her  in  a  fellowship  of  all  peo- 
ples, is  the  goal  of  all  those  who  honestly  desire  in- 
ternational concord.  But  such  an  alliance  or  such  a 
fellowship  can  never  be  more  than  a  farce  if  it  be 
fostered  merely  by  excessive  adulation;  on  the  other 
hand,  excessive  vituperation  can  not  ultimately  pre- 
vent it,  when  common  interest  and  common  respect 
for  the  same  international  purposes  make  it  possible. 
Indeed  a  real  friendship  between  the  two  countries 
can  come  to  reality  only  after  many  of  us — on  both 
sides  of  the  water — have  ruthlessly  done  what  we  can 
to  cut  some  sort  of  path  through  the  jungle  of  mis- 
conceptions in  which  we  now  seem  to  be  lost. 

During  the  war  official  propagandists  did  their 
level  best  to  turn  that  jungle  into  a  swamp.  One 
would  think,  after  reading  some  of  the  "revised" 
school  histories,  that  the  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence was  only  a  temporary  aberration,  and  that  the 
Red-coats  at  Bunker  Hill  were  merely  Prussian  mer- 
cenaries ingeniously  placed  there  to  foster  bad  feel- 
ing between  ourselves  and  the  "Mother  Country." 
Yet  for  all  this  no  "gob"  walked  into  the  American 
Bar  at  Liverpool  without  the  chip  of  1776  on  his 
shoulder,  nor,  after  a  drink  or  so,  did  he  fail  to 
make  clear  that  what  we  had  done  then  we  could, 
against  all  comers,  easily  repeat.  Not  even  the  war- 
time flood  of  British  propaganda  could  wash  out 
that  century-old  attitude.  The  generation  that  went 
to  the  war  had  not  forgotten  that  we  became  a  nation 

114 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

by  successful  revolution  against  the  tyranny  of  Brit- 
ish rule. 

When  Americans  talk  about  Ireland  or  Egypt  or 
India  remaining  "within  the  frame-work,  of  the  Brit- 
ish Empire" — and  assume  that  theirs  is  the  proper 
American  attitude — they  are  like  people  denying 
their  own  parentage.  They  are  not  Americans  at 
all;  they  are  belated  Colonials.  For  if  the  United 
States  of  America  means  anything,  it  means  the 
assertion  of  national  independence;  we  can  under- 
stand the  term  "Self-governing  Dominions"  (the 
adjective  gives  us  the  clue),  but  we  can  under- 
stand better  the  desire  for  complete  political  free- 
dom, especially  in  a  case  where  English  rule  is  in- 
volved. It  is  really  a  pity  that  Mr.  William  Ran- 
dolph Hearst  has  such  a  bad  name  (not  that  he 
doesn't  deserve  it,  of  course)  ;  for  his  bitter  anti- 
English  editorials  have  really  much  more  national 
good  political  sense  in  them  than  have  all  the  apolo- 
getics of  liberal  journals  of  opinion.  It  is  this  na- 
tional sense  of  his  which  partly  explains  why  Mr. 
Hearst  in  general  is  such  a  good  political  prophet, 
and  the  lack  of  it  why  the  "intellectuals"  are  usually 
such  bad  ones.  All  this  may  be  very  unpleasant  read- 
ing, but  I  see  no  use  trying  to  blink  the  facts,  how- 
ever disagreeable  they  may  be.  The  traditional  iso- 
lation of  the  United  States,  to  which  we  are  now 
reverting  after  our  late  rather  disastrous  experiment 
in  search  of  the  international  Holy  Grail,  is  a  reflec- 
tion of  some  of  our  early  idealism  as  much  as  it  is 
the  product  of  mere  selfishness  and  national  indiffer- 
ence.    It  is  not  merely  that  we  decline  to  meddle 

115 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

in  the  affairs  of  other  nations;  there  are  also  certain 
schemes  to  which  we  refuse  to  be  a  party — and  the 
British  scheme  of  Crown  Colony  exploitation  is  one 
of  them. 

The  case  of  Ireland  dramatises  the  whole  situation 
for  Americans.  It  may  seem  grotesque  that  a  legis- 
lative body  could  one  day  pass  a  law  making  it  a 
crime  even  to  think  of  any  new  form  of  government, 
and  on  the  very  next  day  officially  welcome  Mr.  De 
Valera,  who  most  assuredly  is  thinking  of  little  else; 
such  a  sequel  of  events  would  be  grotesque,  except 
in  Albany,  New  York,  U.  S.  A.  Those  cynics  are 
wide  of  the  mark  who  point  sneeringly  to  the  large 
Irish  vote,  which  has  to  be  placated  now  and  again. 
Naturally  the  politicians  keep  a  weather  eye  on  the 
Irish  vote,  but  the  important  thing  which  the  cynics 
seem  not  to  take  into  account  is  that  there  is  that 
Irish  vote  to  keep  a  weather  eye  upon.  Even  during 
the  war  public  opinion  was  tolerant  of  those  who 
platformed  against  English  rule  of  Ireland  and  even 
allowed  a  draftee  to  register  with  his  draft  board 
as  born  in  "the  free  Irish  Republic."  To-day,  in 
these  piping  times  of  bolshevist  hysteria,  it  is  safe  to 
say  that  Jim  Larkin  would  never  have  been  given 
free  residence  in  Sing  Sing,  if  he  had  contented  him- 
self with  preaching  political  independence  for  Ireland 
instead  of  rocking  the  international  boat  with  peculiar 
ideas  of  the  economic  rights  of  the  working  classes. 

The  plain  fact  is  that  American  sympathy  for  Irish 
independence  is  traditional  and  quite  natural;  and 
our  politicians,  legislators,  and  judges  are  terribly 
afraid  of  it.     English  liberals,  of  course,  are  quite 

116 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

aware  of  all  this,  and  see  in  the  abandonment  of 
coercion  in  Ireland  a  good  Instrument  for  bringing 
about  better  Anglo-American  relations.  English 
trade  union  leaders  too  might  do  well  to  consider 
the  American  attitude  seriously;  our  own  trade  union 
leaders  include  many  Irish-Americans  who  would  be 
far  more  ready  to  believe  in  the  internationalism  of 
British  labour  if  it  would  bring  itself  to  endorse 
realistically  Irish  nationalistic  claims.  Meanwhile 
Englishmen  must  reconcile  as  best  they  can  the 
paradox  of  a  nation  eagerly  buying  bonds  of  the  yet 
mythical  Irish  Republic  while  permitting  the  loan  of 
money,  raised  by  its  own  Liberty  Bonds,  to  be  used 
to  pay  the  heavy  expenses  of  quartering  a  British 
army  in  Ireland. 

Again,  British  relations  with  the  Far  East,  with 
China  particularly,  have  hardly  been  of  the  kind 
to  increase  our  admiration  of  British  imperial 
achievements.  For  reasons  difficult  to  analyse,  the 
American  attitude  towards  China  is  an  example  of 
one  of  our  best  international  traditions,  just  as 
England's  Chinese  record  has  been  perhaps  one  of 
her  worst.  I  say  difficult  to  analyse  because  beneath 
the  acts  of  ostensible  friendship  on  the  part  of  this 
country  towards  China  there  has  been  a  curious  yet 
genuine  affection.  We  can  generally  "get  along" 
pretty  well  with  the  "Chink,"  and  has  not  every 
American  city  of  any  size  its  Chinese  restaurant 
where  "chop  suey"  is  the  basic  dish?  (It's  of  no  con- 
sequence that  the  Chinese  know  nothing  of  that  dish 
at  home;  it  has  become  a  symbol  to  us.)  Our  na- 
tional record  in  China  has  been  relatively  decent, 

117 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

excepting  of  course  the  lamentable  exploits  of  the 
present  Administration,  the  Lansing-Ishii  episode  in 
particular;  we  are  the  founders  of  the  "Open  Door" 
policy,  and  of  all  Western  nations  the  Chinese  trusted 
us  the  most.  It  is  perhaps  worth  the  English  lib- 
eral's attention  that  the  popular  mind  in  this  coun- 
try is  not  altogether  ignorant  of  his  country's  record 
in  the  matter  of  the  opium  trade;  that  British  efforts 
to  tie  up  China  commercially  and  financially  make 
no  popular  appeal  to  us;  and  furthermore,  that  tales 
of  barbarity  and  oppression  in  India  sooner  or  later 
reach  the  ears  of  shocked  American  audiences;  that 
the  war-time  alliance  between  this  country  and  Japan 
has  been  fundamentally  an  unnatural  one,  and  that 
English  interests  can  hardly  expect  it  to  remain  per- 
manent. 

Of  course,  an  Englishman  can  legitimately  defend 
himself  against  all  this  with  a  tu  quoque,  referring 
to  our  own  imperialistic  adventures  in  Latin-Amer- 
ica and  elsewhere,  and  from  the  point  of  view  of 
abstract  principle  there  is  really  not  a  fig  to  choose 
between  us.  We  are  brothers  under  the  skin.  But 
unfortunately  Anglo-American  relations  are  not 
helped  by  thus  having  the  pot  call  the  kettle  black; 
and  after  all,  our  own  imperialism  is  a  comparatively 
recent  growth,  it  is  not  spectacular,  it  has  not  become 
part  of  our  national  tradition.  In  the  process  of 
cleansing  our  respective  national  records  of  their 
stains  England,  for  purely  historical  reasons,  will 
have  to  begin  the  contest  in  generosity.  And  through 
causes  largely  not  of  our  own  making,  America's 
record  so  far  has  actually  far  fewer  stains  upon  it, 

118 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

For  example,  one  of  the  neglected  roots  of  anti- 
British  feeling  in  this  country  is  to  be  found  in  Eng- 
land's attitude  towards  Turkey.  Historically  Eng- 
land has  had  to  play,  just  as  she  is  playing  to-day, 
the  role  of  physician  to  the  ever-convalescent  Sick 
Man  of  Europe.  The  control  of  Constantinople  is 
regarded  as  vital  to  the  safety  of  the  British  Empire, 
and  no  sentimental  humanitarianism  about  Turkish 
atrocities  can  mitigate  that  stern  fact — nor,  it  may 
be  added,  can  the  most  vehement  protests  of  English 
liberals  move  their  Foreign  Office  to  change  its  pol- 
icy on  this  point.  But  the  United  States  has  no  "vital 
interest"  in  Constantinople  or  in  the  break-up  of  the 
Turkish  Empire.  On  the  contrary,  most  Americans 
naively  believe  it  would  be  a  "good  thing"  if  the  Turk 
were  kicked  out  of  Europe  bag  and  baggage,  and, 
indeed,  nobody  in  this  country  except  perhaps  the 
cigarette-makers,  who  would  be  somewhat  at  a  loss 
for  attractive  advertising  pictures,  would  care  if  he 
were  kicked  off  the  face  of  the  earth.  Foreigners 
ought  to  know  that  the  culture  and  moral  tone  of 
America  is  set  by  the  prosperous  Middle  West  in 
happy  conjunction  with  the  Methodist  Episcopal 
Church — whose  recent  resolution  by  the  way,  against 
recognition  of  the  Irish  Republic  should  be  taken 
with  a  grain  of  anti-Catholic  salt — and  up  and  down 
this  fair  land  the  Turkish  infidel  is  regularly  stormed 
against  from  rural  pulpits.  That  England  should 
be  the  staunchest  protector  of  this  unfortunate 
heathen  is  disquieting  to  many  Puritan  American 
consciences.  At  bottom,  America  is  a  narrow- 
minded,  bigoted,  Protestant  Christian  country,  and 

119 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

we  have  no  use  at  all  for  those  nations  which  do 
not  believe  with  us  that  the  world  ought  to  be  made 
over  in  our  own  image.  Englishmen,  in  particular, 
seem  blissfully  unaware  of  this  condition.  Let  them 
take  fair  warning;  if  it  ever  does  come  to  a  war 
between  us,  here  in  this  mentality  of  ours  will  be  one 
of  the  explanations  of  the  fanatical  fervour  with 
which  it  will  be  waged. 

Naturally,  in  saying  this  I  do  not  mean  to  speak  in 
any  alarmist  sense.  The  fact  is  of  course  that  we 
can  go  far  in  our  quarrels  with  England  before  it 
need  ever  come  to  blows.  But  a  danger  lurks  in  the 
very  elasticity  of  our  attitude;  and  the  danger  is 
that  it  can  be  abused.  A  large  part  of  the  latent  anti- 
British  feeling  in  America  to-day  is  a  direct  conse- 
quence of  what  are  felt  to  be  the  humiliations  of  the 
late  war — we  feel  that  we  didn't  get  much  out  of  the 
affair  except  high  prices,  bad  debts,  and  prohibition. 
It  irritates  us  to  think  of  the  Englishman  taking  his 
own  personal  liberty  so  much  for  granted;  if  we  are 
going  to  be  miserable,  we  want  him  to  be  miserable 
too.  And  many  estimable  Americans  are  distinctly 
annoyed  at  the  spectacle  of  England  getting  away 
with  everything  that's  not  tied  down.  As  M.  Fri- 
bourg  indelicately  observed  in  a  recent  issue  of  he 
Petit  Parisien,  England  got  the  lion's  share  of  the 
spoils  of  the  peace  treaty:  "An  empire  with  close  to 
19,000,000  square  miles,  peopled  with  422,000,- 
000  of  inhabitants,  I  imagine  is  worth  our  atten- 
tion." How  can  those  great  captains  of  the  Amer- 
ican oil  industry  have  felt  when  they  read  in  the 
same  newspaper  of  England's  acquiring  all  the  Per- 

120 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

sian  concessions  and  that  the  United  States  had  been 
graciously  offered  the  lemon  of  a  mandate  over  Ar- 
menia. Our  shipping  and  commercial  men  too  have 
none  too  pleasant  recollections  of  the  manner  in 
which  our  benevolent  neutrality,  before  19 17,  was 
abused  to  the  point  of  our  mails  being  opened  and 
our  business  dealings  scrutinised.  And  there  are  a 
good  few  of  us  who  do  not  relish  the  sight  of  English 
secret  service  agents  being  used  as  witnesses  in  trials 
of  American  citizens — the  whole  sorry  business  was 
rather  overdone  during  the  war,  and  it  shows  neither 
good  judgment  nor  good  taste  for  the  same  activities 
to  be  continued  now.  In  short,  Englishmen  should 
be  aware  that  even  a  free  horse  can  be  ridden  to 
death.  Not  every  Administration  will  be  as  sub- 
servient to  British  interests  as  the  soon-to-be-deceased 
Administration  has  been  during  the  last  eight  long 
years. 

Besides  these  more  or  less  minor  irritations,  the 
real  basis  of  anti-British  feeling  in  America,  is,  as  it 
always  has  been,  the  Englishman  himself.  In  "Why 
Men  Fight"  Bertrand  Russell  speaks  of  the  hot 
hatred  of  the  Germans  "on  account  of  our  pride." 
He  goes  on, 

.  .  .  the  Germans  are  maddened  by  our  spiritual  immobility. 
At  bottom  we  have  regarded  the  Germans  as  one  regards 
flies  on  a  hot  day:  they  are  a  nuisance,  one  has  to  brush 
them  off,  but  it  would  not  occur  to  one  to  be  turned  aside 
by  them. 

Now  this  Englishman's  feeling  that  other  nations 
really  don't  count  is,  of  course,  far  less  strong  in  its 
manifestation  towards  us  than  towards  any  other 

121 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

foreigner.  But  it  is  replaced  by  an  unconscious  snob- 
bery, which  is  perhaps  worse;  it  is  at  any  rate  more 
exasperating.  No  one  who  has  ever  travelled  on  a 
British  steamship  going,  let  us  say,  to  Cape  Town, 
can  have  failed  to  observe  the  subtle  line  of  social 
demarcation  between  the  Englishman  and  the  Colo- 
nial. It  crops  out  in  the  most  unexpected  ways,  but 
it  is  always  there,  and  the  Colonial  is  made  to  feel 
very  definitely  that  he  is  an  inferior.  The  English- 
man assumes  his  superiority  as  naturally  as  he  as- 
sumes the  fact  of  the  British  Empire.  Similarly,  in 
his  attitude  towards  Americans,  the  average  English- 
man assumes,  probably  unconsciously,  that  we  are 
still  Colonials,  rather  capricious  Colonials  to  be  sure, 
and  with  peculiar,  amusing  ways  of  our  own,  but  still 
Colonials.  America  has  hardly  become  a  definite 
national  entity  in  his  consciousness;  we  do  not,  quite 
literally,  exist  as  a  rival  nation  or  as  an  important 
factor  in  his  world.  We  both  speak  the  same  lan- 
guage ;  we  have  the  same  traditions  of  law  and  civili- 
sation; we  are  of  one  colour  and  blood;  we  are  all 
Anglo-Saxons — and  is  it  not  an  Anglo-Saxon  world? 
The  Englishman  regards  an  alliance  with  us,  at  all 
events  common  action  with  us,  as  perfectly  natural, 
if  not  indeed,  inevitable — with  England  doing  the 
directing.  I  shall  not  stress  this  point  because  Amer- 
icans understand  it  only  too  well;  it  would  make  us 
angry,  if  it  did  not  make  us  laugh.  After  all,  Eng- 
lishmen are  hardly  to  be  blamed  for  not  seeing  the 
point.  Our  own  snobs  with  money  have  flattered 
them  to  the  top  of  their  bent.  Yet  nationally  we  are 
of  the  mood  of  Mark  Twain  when  he  wrote  "A  Con- 

122 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

necticut  Yankee" ;  it  is  still  true  that  we  regard  our- 
selves as  the  salt  of  the  earth.  And  while  I  do 
not  seek  to  pass  any  judgment  on  these  respective 
claims  to  superiority,  I  may  perhaps  point  out  that 
no  genuine  Anglo-American  entente  cordiale  can 
come  into  existence  until  England  has  accepted  the 
fact  of  America,  as,  after  four  horrible  years,  she 
had  to  accept  the  fact  of  Germany.  It  is  because 
I  for  one  want  that  acceptance  to  come  without  the 
bloody  intrusion  of  war,  and  because  so  many  of  my 
own  friends  are  Englishmen,  that  I  commend  to  the 
liberal  Englishman's  attention  these  few  unpalatable 
truths. 

The  present  condition  of  things  is  altogether  un- 
natural. The  British  Empire  to-day  is  to  a  great 
extent  an  historical  accident.  The  leadership  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  world,  if  that  world  is  not  to  be  de- 
stroyed in  futile  fratricidal  strife,  by  the  nature  of 
sheer  hard  economic  fact  belongs  henceforth  to 
America  and  not  to  England.  A  war  between  the 
two  countries  would  mean  the  irretrievable  defeat  of 
England  (there  is  nothing  of  jingo  pride  in  this) 
and  her  relegation  to  the  comparative  importance  of 
a  Scandinavian  country.  England's  present  control 
over  alien  populations  is — as  the  best  minds  of  Eng- 
land have  admitted — transitory  and  introductory  to 
their  complete  self-government.  Her  imperialistic 
exploits  are  in  a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium.  The 
British  Isles  are  not  economically  self-sufficient. 
They  are  not  financially  self-sufficient.  Without  the 
open  or  tacit  support  of  the  United  States  England 
would  to-day  be  bankrupt.    She  can  not  compete  with 

123 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

us  industrially  ( for  which  fact,  if  she  were  wise,  she 
would  thank  Heaven) — she  has  not  the  natural  re- 
sources with  which  to  do  so.  Her  present  appear- 
ance of  great  power  comes  from  the  possession  of 
privilege — the  privilege  of  exploitation — and  priv- 
ilege in  this  sense  is  being  irrevocably  done  away 
with.  In  a  word,  England  in  the  terms  of  realistic 
economics  must  shortly  cease  to  be  the  tail  that  wags 
the  Anglo-Saxon  dog.  No  American  in  his  right 
mind  wants  his  own  country  to  don  the  toga  of  the 
greatest  power  of  the  twentieth  century  (we  admit 
we  are  the  most  moral!),  yet  it  would  be  far  more 
sensible  for  us  to  make  such  pretensions  than  for 
England  to  do  so. 

I  shall  of  course  be  accused  of  inconsistency  for 
saying  that  we  in  America  have  no  desire  to  meddle 
in  other  people's  affairs,  and  at  the  same  time  ad- 
mitting that  we  want  to  reform  the  world.  But  this 
is  only  the  inconsistency  of  the  facts.  Imperialisti- 
cally,  we  have  little  taste  and  less  tradition  for  med- 
dling in  other  people's  affairs;  in  that  sense  we  really 
do  believe  in  self-determination — because  we  have 
had  such  good  luck  with  it  ourselves,  probably. 
Tdealistically  or  morally,  as  you  will,  it  is  the  sad 
truth  that  we  should  like  to  see  the  world  made 
over  in  the  image  of  Kansas.  We  want  to  justify 
our  civilisation,  but  we  have  little  desire  to  extend 
it  by  force  or — as  the  clever  historian  said  of  Brit- 
ain's way — in  a  fit  of  absent-mindedness.  We  want 
other  peoples  to  agree  with  us;  we  don't  particularly 
want  them  to  become  part  of  us. 

Englishmen  ought  to  undergo  a  transvaluation  of 
124 


ROOTS  of  ANTI-BRITISH  FEELING 

values.  What  the  world  needs  is  not  the  British 
Empire  but  English  civilisation.  Far  from  having 
nothing  to  learn  from  England,  America,  with  the 
rest  of  the  world,  has  everything  to  learn  from  her — 
justice,  a  vivid  sense  of  personal  and  civil  rights,  the 
infallible  expediency  of  free  speech,  political  good 
sense,  the  whole  art  of  compromise,  sportsmanship, 
and  good  taste.  America  can  take  care  well  enough 
of  the  materialistic  task  of  seeing  that  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  world  continues  to  exist;  to  England  is  re- 
served the  more  important  job  of  proving  that  Anglo- 
Saxon  civilisation  is  worth  existing.  If  I  were  giving 
any  advice  to  liberal  Englishmen,  it  would  be  this: 
Forget  your  Empire  and  remember  your  poets;  the 
Empire  isn't  worth  a  damn  1 


12$ 


PROGRESS  versus 
INDUSTRIALISM 

When  Mayor  Hylan  of  New  York  indignantly 
repudiated  the  recent  census-estimate  that  the  Island 
of  Manhattan  had  actually  decreased  in  population 
since  1910,  he  was  but  giving  expression,  in  its  most 
naive  form,  to  the  popular  fallacy  about  progress 
which  dates  back  to  Darwin.  Rationally  one  might 
welcome  the  fact  that  there  are  fewer  people  on  this 
crowded  island — such  a  fortunate  development  would 
give  those  of  us  who  are  left  a  little  more  space  to 
move  around  in,  which  would  be  particularly  grate- 
ful in  the  hot  spells.  But  the  Mayor  feels  that  the 
honour  of  the  city  has  been  somehow  impugned; 
fewer  people  means  retrogression,  the  hands  of  the 
clock  are  being  turned  back — in  a  word,  we  are  not 
progressing. 

The  popularisation  and  spread  of  the  doctrines  of 
evolution  have  given  the  common  concept  of  progress 
an  odd  twist.  To-day  progress  means  specifically  the 
lapse  of  time.  Select  any  two  types  of  civilisation 
you  wish,  and  to  the  ordinary  man  that  type  which  is 
chronologically  the  later  is  automatically  the  higher. 
It  must  be  so;  otherwise  what  meaning  would  there 
be  in  evolution? — and  evolution  is  still  a  modern  idol. 
The  idea  has  insinuated  itself  into  our  liberal  termin- 
ology, "forward-looking"  for  example,  although  here 
again  rationally,  if  present  tendencies  continue,  the 

126 


PROGRESS  versus  INDUSTRIALISM 

person  interested  in  true  human  progress  will  be  in- 
creasingly compelled  to  look  backward.  It  is  diffi- 
cult nowadays  to  win  acceptance  for  the  older  con- 
cept of  progress  as  a  closer  approximation  to  an 
ideal  of  happiness  and  human  projection.  Progress, 
properly,  is  a  qualitative  and  not  a  quantitative  con- 
cept. Mayor  Hylan  to  the  contrary  notwithstand- 
ing, the  man  who  is  really  interested  in  progress  does 
not  care  how  many  people  there  may  be  on  the 
earth.  He  is  interested  rather  in  the  kind  of  people 
they  are,  and  in  the  kind  of  lives  they  lead.  Progress 
does  not  connote  the  piling  up  of  tools  and  material, 
but  rather  the  uses  to  which  these  things  are  put. 
It  implies  a  set  of  ends,  or  values,  in  terms  of  which 
institutions  and  tendencies  may  be  appraised. 

From  this  point  of  view,  the  series  of  phenomena 
which  we  loosely  group  under  the  word  industrialism 
may  be  either  an  aid  or  a  hindrance  to  true  human 
progress.  In  point  of  fact,  up  to  the  present  time 
it  has  been  an  hindrance.  With  the  ever-accelerat- 
ing development  of  modern  industrialism,  we  have 
reached  a  point  when  we  must  turn  sharply  around 
and  re-examine  all  our  old  assumptions.  The  recent 
war,  which  came  very  near  to  destroying  the  social 
order  so  far  as  Central  Europe  is  concerned,  was 
in  the  deepest  sense  a  revolt  against  the  repressions 
and  discipline  of  an  iron  industrialism.  Human 
nature  simply  could  not  stand  the  inner  strain;  and 
it  went  to  pieces;  scientifically  and  methodically,  if 
you  like,  but  none  the  less  actually.  So,  too,  in 
ancient  Sparta  the  discipline  of  the  citizen  for  the 
good  of  the  State  reached  its  perfection  almost  sim- 

127 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

ultaneously  with  the  appearance  of  those  inner  re- 
bellions that  finally  destroyed  it.  When  industrial- 
ism, which  makes  productive  efficiency  possible,  be- 
comes dehumanised,  as  it  is  to-day,  the  human  ani- 
mal rebels  with  disastrous  results,  precisely  because 
modern  productive  efficiency  and  militancy  of  the 
old,  male,  predatory,  buccaneering  sort  are  at  bot- 
tom incompatible.  Modern  nationalistic  wars — with 
their  inevitable  conscription  of  the  entire  citizenry 
and  regimentation  of  the  entire  resources  of  the  State 
— are  far  too  high  a  price  to  pay  for  the  correction 
of  the  evils  of  a  rigid  peace-time  industrialism.  Yet 
they  are  the  price  we  shall  continue  to  pay,  even  if 
in  the  end  they  destroy  us  utterly,  so  long  as  indus- 
trialism continues  on  its  present  lines  of  develop- 
ment. 

When,  somewhere  back  in  biological  history,  liv- 
ing organisms  diverged  into  two  streams  of  tendency 
— one  developing  into  that  gorgeous  instinctive  liv- 
ing mechanism,  the  ant,  and  the  other  developing  into 
man — it  is  fairly  safe  to  say  that  nature  (not  even 
with  a  capital  N)  could  hardly  have  anticipated  our 
modern  factory-system.  Yet  the  development  of 
the  ant  has  been  much  more  compatible  with  that 
system  than  the  development  of  man.  The  ant  has 
reached  a  point  where  it  has  no  period  of  infancy 
whatever;  a  few  seconds  after  emerging  into  the  air, 
its  structure  complete  in  every  way,  it  sets  to  work 
upon  its  allotted  task — an  ideal  arrangement  for 
factory  workers ;  no  bother  about  childhood  or  edu- 
cation or  natural  laziness  or  even  sex,  for  the  ants 
very  sensibly  keep  their  workers  neuter.    Moreover, 

128 


PROGRESS  versus  INDUSTRIALISM 

there  are  no  unemployment-difficulties  among  these 
highly  developed  ants;  within  the  limits  of  their  in- 
tricate social  structure,  each  member  has  his  definite 
task  to  perform;  in  fact  his  body  is  physiologically 
built  for  his  task  and  he  sets  to  work  without  a 
moment's  hesitation  or  awkwardness.  We  can 
watch  in  the  evolution  of  the  ant,  specialisation — 
from  the  human  point  of  view — to  the  wth  degree, 
and  habit  made  inflexible  not  merely  through  repe- 
tition and  self-control,  but  actually  carried  over  into 
the  physiological  structure  and  "set."  It  is  no  para- 
dox that  among  the  ants,  of  all  living  creatures,  pure 
parasitism  has  reached  its  most  perfect  development. 
Not  only  do  certain  tribes  of  ants  deliberately  go  out 
to  capture  slaves,  or  steal  the  eggs  of  their  neigh- 
bours and  bring  up  the  next  generation  as  slaves, 
but  in  some  cases  they  are  so  thoroughly  developed 
that  they  actually  can  not  eat  their  own  food.  These 
delicate  creatures  have  to  be  fed  through  the  mouth 
by  other  ants  specially  trained  for  that  purpose; 
and  they  will  die  of  starvation  if  left  alone  even  in 
the  midst  of  plenty.  Here,  indeed,  is  epicureanism 
in  extremis,  and  to  an  imaginative  mind  there  are  not 
lacking  certain  analogies  to  modern  industrialism 
and  conspicuous  waste  among  humans,  upon  which 
it  would,  perhaps,  be  painful  to  dwell. 

But  man  took  a  different  road  from  the  ant,  and 
as  we  at  present  know  him,  of  all  living  creatures, 
he  has  the  longest  relative  period  of  infancy,  ap- 
proximately one-third  of  his  natural  life.  Our  mod- 
ern habit-philosophers  and  disciplinarians  too  often 
forget  the  full  implications  of  this  simple  fact,  just 

129 


AMERICA  <and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

as  our  modern  industrialism  forgets  it  completely. 
It  means,  of  course,  an  infinitely  high  degree  of 
flexibility  and  adaptability,  a  nervous  system  which, 
for  all  its  massive  mechanisms,  still  preserves  a  wide 
margin  of  variation.  Man  must  change  his  work, 
his  pace,  his  thoughts,  his  environment  constantly 
and  continuously,  if  he  is  to  satisfy  his  deeper  needs 
— "getting  into  a  rut"  is  everywhere  recognised  as 
the  cardinal  sin  against  human  nature.  In  the  larger 
number  of  modern  States,  even  when  most  highly 
industrialised,  the  farmer  is  still  the  chief  man  of 
the  nation,  as  agriculture  is  the  chief  industry.  By 
the  very  nature  of  his  incessantly  changing  task,  for 
all  its  drudgery,  the  farmer  is  kept  sane,  and  it  is 
his  breed  that  keeps  the  cities  sane.  But  now  the 
spirit  of  industrialism  is  beginning  to  invade  the 
farm.  Steadily  more  and  more,  all  mankind  is  com- 
ing under  the  blighting  influence  of  mechanical  rou- 
tine. 

Deeper  perhaps  than  any  need  for  change  in  the 
method  of  education,  far  deeper  than  any  need  for 
new  political  structures,  is  the  fundamental  need  for 
humanising  modern  industrialism.  Modern  tech- 
nology and  machine-processes  must  be  prevented 
from  becoming  anything  more  than  instruments,  and 
rather  unpleasant  instruments  at  that,  for  the  achieve- 
ment of  great  and  enriching  human  ends.  The  wor- 
ship of  quiet,  regular  habits  of  industry  must  be 
rejected. 

It  is  not,  therefore,  a  mere  accident  [writes  Graham 
Wallas]  that  the  Great  Society  has  been  developed  with 
most   success   among    those    North    European    races   whose 

130 


PROGRESS  versus  INDUSTRIALISM 

power  of  blind  habituation  excited  the  contempt  of  the 
Greeks.  If  Aristotle  could  stand  on  London  Bridge  or  at 
Liverpool  Street  Station  on  any  week-day  at  8.45  a.m.,  he 
would  think  that  the  "Kelts"  were  more  insane  than  ever. 

Precisely;  and  if  Aristotle  were  to  go  into  a  large 
automobile  factory  in  Detroit  and  watch  a  man  turn 
a  screw  in  one  direction  with  mechanical  regularity 
for  eight  mortal  hours  a  day,  he  would  wonder  if  he 
were  observing  a  human  being  or  a  kind  of  ant  with 
a  new  structure;  and  probably  at  the  melancholy 
spectacle  of  the  scientific  employment-engineer  he 
would  yield  himself  completely  a  prey  to  despair. 

It  is  no  mere  sentimental  regard  for  fair  play  for 
the  workers,  or  any  dilettante  wish  to  democratise 
industry,  which  makes  imperative  the  break-up  of 
the  routines  of  modern  industrialism.  This  attack 
does  not  need  to  be  justified  on  any  altruistic  ground; 
it  is  quite  literally  a  matter  of  self-preservation, 
After  all,  a  man  is  much  more  a  playing  than  a 
working  animal;  against  his  inclinations  he  can  be 
driven  only  so  far.  His  habits  are  always  more  un- 
stable than  his  inherited  dispositions;  and  to  build  a 
civilisation  on  the  former  rather  than  the  latter  is 
to  build  on  sand  instead  of  on  rock.  To  procure  by 
drill  and  regimentation  certain  habits  of  regularity 
and  acceptance  of  industrial  routine,  is  merely  transi- 
tory and  deceptive.  Modern  industrialism  must  be 
made  to  conform  to  the  true  nature  of  man,  and 
until  it  has  been  so  made,  anything  in  the  shape  of 
true  human  progress  is  impossible. 


*3i 


(The  TWILIGHT  of  the 
GODS 

The  League  of  Nations  may  be  just  a  crooked 
device  to  get  us  to  guarantee  England's  conquests, 
as  Mr.  Hearst  is  never  tired  of  telling  us  it  is;  it  may- 
be a  beneficent  instrument  to  restore  the  broken 
heart  of  the  world,  as  Mr.  Wilson  assured  us  again 
only  the  other  day.  But  most  ordinary  Americans 
have  given  little  thought  to  the  matter;  a  goodly 
majority  of  them  voted  for  Mr.  Harding  last  au- 
tumn simply  because  they  were  sick  of  the  old  Ad- 
ministration, and,  oddly  enough,  both  those  who 
voted  for  and  those  who  voted  against  the  League 
of  Nations  did  so  in  the  belief  that  they  were  voting 
for  lessened  chances  of  war.  Yet  whatever  hap- 
pens, they  will  not  be  greatly  disillusioned,  for  their 
affections  and  emotions  are  not  touched  by  this 
ghostly  "issue,"  let  the  politicians  rave  about  it  as 
they  will. 

But  it  is  quite  otherwise  with  the  major  baseball 
leagues.  A  scandal  here  is  something  that  comes 
home  intimately  to  almost  every  American  family, 
and  not  merely  to  fathers  and  mothers  alone  but 
to  the  "kids"  of  all  classes  to  whom  the  names  of 
Cicotte,  Jackson,  Weaver,  Felsch,  and  the  others 
are  even  better  known  than  to  their  parents,  and 
certainly  more  revered.  To  the  adult  citizen,  and 
to  the  adolescent  citizens  to  come,  the  recent  dis- 

132 


The  TWILIGHT  of  the  GODS 

closures  of  corruption  in  the  baseball  world  have 
been  the  real  news  of  the  year,  and  the  saddest. 
Here  is  something  that  has  really  hurt.  Political 
ideals  might  go,  faith  in  parliamentary  government 
might  go,  public  integrity  and  decency  might  go,  con- 
stitutional liberty  and  civil  rights  might  go — must 
honest  sportsmanship  now  go  the  way  of  all  the 
rest?  It  is  saddening  to  reflect  upon  the  precocious 
cynicism  which  will  inevitably  be  inculcated  in  the 
younger  generation  by  the  "selling-out"  of  their 
idols.  Only  yesterday  the  writer  stood  idly  watching 
a  city  corner-lot  game  and  one  little  shaver  in  the 
outfield  dropped  what  appeared  to  be  an  easy  "fly" 
— "Aw,  Jimmie,  what  was  put  under  your  piller  last 
night?"  scornfully  queried  his  disgusted  team-mate 
on  second  base.  Yes,  it  is  very  melancholy  indeed; 
we  found  ourselves  wondering,  oh,  ever  so  slightly, 
if  perhaps  the  little  second-baseman  hadn't  perhaps 
some  justification.  It  is  a  scandal  which  has  shaken 
the  faith  of  Americans  in  first  and  last  things. 

Now  although  it  may  sound  cynical,  even  though  it 
is  not  so  intended,  we  have  ourselves  since  child- 
hood's happiest  hours  thoroughly  enjoyed  profes- 
sional baseball  games,  yet  of  recent  years  we  have 
never  doubted  that  the  game  has  had  certain  ques- 
tionable features  about  it.  We  have  often  suspected 
that  some  of  the  games  were  "fixed."  Not,  let  us 
hasten  to  confess,  in  the  sense  that  individual  players 
had  agreed  in  advance  to  "throw"  games,  but  that 
managers  of  special  teams  and  the  heads  of  the  re- 
spective leagues  had  gotten  together  and  arranged 
schedules,  swapped  players,  and  so  on,  to  the  end 

133 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

that  different  cities  might  capture  the  pennants  and 
that  public  interest  might  be  kept  at  concert  pitch. 
There  was  money  for  them  in  these  arrangements 
and  in  an  age  of  sheer  commercialisation  like  ours 
it  would  be  folly  not  to  expect  it  to  take  place. 

In  one  sense,  of  course,  this  sort  of  thing  is  quite 
legitimate.  It  does  not  reflect  at  all  on  the  integrity 
of  the  individual  player.  It  is  just  part  of  the  nor- 
mal scheme  of  things  in  what  we  call  clean  profes- 
sional baseball.  It  is  something,  however,  utterly 
different  from  the  spirit  of  sportsmanship  in  college 
football — there  the  question  of  traditions,  the  sense 
of  common  life  in  the  victory  or  defeat  of  the  team 
representing  one's  own  college,  is  part  of  one's  self, 
and  to  all  except  the  prig  a  very  real  part.  We 
swell  with  pride  when  our  college  wins,  and  are  cor- 
respondingly depressed  when  it  loses.  Childish,  of 
course,  but  a  genuine  thing  in  American  emotional 
life.  tWith  professional  baseball — even  when  abso- 
lutely on  the  level — the  centre  of  interest  is  wholly 
different;  it  is  a  delight  in  the  technical  proficiency 
of  the  individuals  per  se  and  in  a  particular  team  as 
a  whole.  There  is  none  of  that  deeper  sense  of  per- 
sonal identification;  we  are  glad  when  New  York 
or  Brooklyn  wins  the  pennant  chiefly  because  it 
means  an  opportunity  to  see  the  world's  series  with- 
out bothersome  travelling.  It  never  occurs  to  us 
to  take  a  civic  pride  in  our  home  team  in  the  sense 
in  which  we  take  a  pride  in  our  college  team.  The 
players  may  come  from  anywhere;  they  do  not  rep- 
resent our  city  as  such,  but  only  the  managerial  and 
financial  astuteness  of  the  owner  of  the  club  which 

134 


The  TWILIGHT  of  the  GODS 

bears  our  city's  name.  The  player  we  grew  fond 
of  last  year  may  hold  out  for  a  bigger  contract  for 
next  season,  and  we  shall  see  him  perhaps  in  a  dif- 
ferent uniform.  It  is  not  like  the  .contests  of  city 
against  city  in  ancient  Greece,  or  even  like  the  county 
cricket  matches  in  England  between,  say,  Surrey 
and  Lancashire  where  something  like  real  local  pride 
is  involved.  The  sport  has  become,  in  a  word,  purely 
and  solely  professional. 

And  yet  it  is  precisely  this  fact  which  goes  far  to 
explain  why  the  individual  player,  whom  we  had  not 
hitherto  suspected  of  dishonesty,  has  finally  suc- 
cumbed to  the  blandishments  of  the  gambler.  He 
has  had  none  of  the  college  foot-ball  player's  sense 
of  the  generations  before  him;  oftentimes  he  has  not 
been  even  a  resident  of  the  city  which  he  nominally 
represented;  he  has  been  accustomed  to  regarding 
playing  in  one  uniform  rather  than  another  as  solely 
a  question  of  trade  advantage;  the  newspapers' 
sporting  slang  has  always  referred  to  him  as  having 
been  "sold"  to  this  or  "bought"  by  that  particular 
club.  Inevitably  he  has  come  to  regard  his  profes- 
sional skill  as  in  the  nature  of  a  commodity  to  be 
offered  in  the  market  at  the  highest  price,  rather  than 
as  something  which  might  identify  him  more  per- 
sonally and  affectionately  with  the  community  of 
which  he  is  a  part.  In  a  word,  there  has  been  no  ap- 
peal to  his  civic  pride.  Baseball  has  become  his  pro- 
fession, not  his  sport.  Commercialism  has  caused 
him  to  look  upon  the  game  as  a  huckster  would  look 
at  it  rather  than  as  a  sportsman.  Over  and  above 
this  deeper  reason  is  the  indubitable  fact  that  most 

*3S 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

baseball  players  are,  and  of  necessity  have  to  be, 
young,  that  they  usually  know  very  little  of  life  out- 
side of  the  baseball  field,  that  the  college  graduate 
among  them  is  the  exception  rather  than  the  rule,  that 
taken  as  a  class  they  are  usually  simple,  unsophis- 
ticated, and  good-natured  fellows.  With  these  qual- 
ities they  are  then  over-flattered  and  over-heroised  by 
the  newspapers.  They  are  idolised  by  the  public; 
they  are  in  most  cases  very  popular  with  the  ladies. 
Added  to  all  their  difficulties,  in  the  winter  and 
early  spring,  when  they  are  neither  in  practice  nor 
actually  playing,  they  are  constantly  beset  by  swarms 
of  suave,  sophisticated,  unscrupulous  gamblers. 

Now,  the  wonder  is  not  that  under  the  circum- 
stances a  few  individual  players  have  been  found  to 
be  so  foolish  and  so  unsportsmanlike  as  to  "sell  out" 
their  team-mates  and  the  public,  but  that  the  great 
majority,  in  spite  of  temptations,  have  remained  ab- 
solutely honest.  It  is  really  a  tremendous  tribute  to 
the  vitality  of  American  baseball  and  to  the  individ- 
ual competitive  qualities  which  it  seems  to  arouse 
in  the  players  that  these  unpleasant  scandals,  like  the* 
present  one,  have  been  so  few  and  far  between. 
From  the  practical  point  of  view,  it  is  a  good  thing 
that  the  present  disclosures  have  been  given  wide 
publicity  and  that  the  heavy  penalties  inflicted  upon 
the  foolish  players  in  question  should  have  been 
burned  into  the  consciousness  of  every  other  profes- 
sional player.  If  the  present  scandal  results  in  a 
more  public  and  disinterested  control  of  the  two 
major  leagues,  every  one  will  probably  be  the  gainer. 

The  proposal  to  make  gambling  on  baseball  games 
136 


The  TWILIGHT  of  the  GODS 

either  a  penal  offence  or  a  misdemeanour  is,  of 
course,  mere  nonsense  and  futility.  Gambling  on  the 
game  should  be  public  and  allowed;  but  the  heaviest 
and  most  immediate  penalties  (the  severest  of  which 
would  be  permanent  expulsion  from  the  game) 
should  attach  to  the  player  who  bets  a  single  dollar. 
Nevertheless,  something  like  the  present  scandal  is 
bound  to  occur  periodically  unless  the  deeper  faults 
of  professional  baseball  can  be  eradicated.  To  elim- 
inate for  ever  all  dishonesty  from  the  game  it  must 
become — to  the  individual  player — something  deeper 
and  more  important  than  a  mere  exhibition  of  tech- 
nical skill.  It  must  have  some  more  genuine  and 
vital  relation  to  his  social  life  as  a  citizen. 


*37 


The  COUNTRY  versus 
the  TOWN 

With  praiseworthy  enterprise  the  New  York 
World  sent  a  staff  reporter  to  various  cities  through- 
out the  Middle  West — Indianapolis,  Cincinnati, 
Cleveland,  Pittsburgh,  Chicago — to  interview  the 
"plain  people"  on  the  recent  election.  The  small  sal- 
aried men,  clerks,  labourers,  porters,  machinists,  and 
the  like,  all  those  to  whom  the  high  cost  of  living  is 
something  more  than  a  campaign  slogan,  are  the 
people  the  reporter  selects  for  his  interviews;  and 
the  results  are  far  more  illuminating  than  the  con- 
ventional straw-vote.  In  the  latter  we  usually  can 
only  guess  at  the  deciding  motive  of  the  choice;  we 
deal  only  with  results.  But  by  this  method  of  tabloid 
interview  we  do  get  some  hint  of  what  the  people 
are  thinking.  For  example,  a  bare  registration  of  a 
Chicago  hotel  clerk's  straw-vote  for  Cox,  conceals 
the  human  complex  of  feeling  contained  in  this  little 
declaration:  "I  heard  young  Roosevelt  here  last 
night  and  he  is  a  most  convincing  talker.  After 
what  he  said,  I  think  the  League  of  Nations  would 
be  a  good  thing.  Anyway,  Cox  is  for  booze."  (Oh, 
gullible  man!)  Or  could  we  guess  from  a  mere 
vote  what  this  Michigan  Avenue  modiste  was  think- 
ing? "I  saw  the  Republicans  when  they  were  out 
here  nominating  Harding.  They  were  a  bunch  of 
rowdies  and  cheap  skates.    If  I  had  a  vote  it  would 

138 


The  COUNTRY  versus  the  TOWN 

go  for  the  Democrats."  She  had  been  in  Chicago, 
but  had  not  been  in  San  Francisco. 

Several  notable  points  stand  out  in  these  inter- 
views. First,  few  take  the  League  of  Nations  seri- 
ously, except  the  Irish  who  invariably  are  against  it 
because  they  think  it  means  the  throttling  of  Irish 
independence  and  always  warn  Cox,  if  he  wants  to 
keep  the  Irish  vote  in  the  party,  to  "lay  off  the 
League  of  Nations  stuff."  Second,  everybody  is  in- 
tensely interested  in  how  the  high  cost  of  living 
can  be  reduced,  but  at  the  same  time  everybody  is 
rather  sceptical  of  either  party  doing  anything  effec- 
tive. Third  (perhaps  as  a  result  of  this),  there  is 
an  equal  contempt  for  both  old  parties  as  reaction- 
ary; and  there  are  frequent  predictions  that  1924 
will  see  a  real  progressive  third  party  in  the  field. 
Fourth,  there  is  no  sentiment  either  for  or  against 
Debs  or  the  Socialists;  either  the  ordinary  man  will 
make  a  choice  of  what  he  seems  to  regard  in  this 
campaign  as  necessary  evils,  or  he  will  not  vote  at  all. 
Fifth,  without  exception  every  voter  would  like  a 
chance  to  vote  on  a  clean-cut  issue  of  wet  or  dry, 
and  most  of  the  labourers  are  frankly  for  beers  and 
wines,  often,  indeed,  frankly  for  booze.  Every- 
body, including  those  few  in  favour  of  prohibition, 
are  angry  at  both  parties  dodging  the  issue,  although 
there  seems  to  be  a  general  feeling  that  Mr.  Cox  is 
wetter  than  Mr.  Harding. 

On  this  last  point,  the  interviews  are  probably  not 
representative  of  public  opinion.  The  people  inter- 
viewed are  mostly  from  the  town  or  city;  seldom 
from  the  rural  districts,  where  the  majority  of  men, 

139 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

and  the  women  almost  to  a  woman,  are  for  prohibi- 
tion. On  this  particular  question,  in  fact,  a  national 
referendum  would  have  special  significance;  because 
the  chances  are  that  it  would  reveal  a  definite  con- 
flict between  the  town  and  the  country  on  this  point, 
between  industry  and  agriculture.  It  would  reveal 
the  agrarian  population's  deep  distrust  of  the  urban 
standard  of  morals  and  of  "having  a  good  time," 
its  dislike  and  jealousy.  The  cities,  and  the  city 
workers  in  them,  are  godless  and  irreligious  from 
the  country's  point  of  view;  from  that  of  the  city, 
the  country  in  turn  is  hypocritical  and  narrow.  Com- 
plaint after  complaint  is  registered  in  these  inter- 
views in  the  World  by  the  city  worker  at  the  "preach- 
ers and  the  women"  who  seem  to  be  in  a  conspiracy 
to  take  the  joy  out  of  life. 

Something  of  this  same  conflict  of  ideals  and 
morals  between  the  town  and  country,  but  here 
sharply  intensified  by  the  economic  dominance  of  the 
country  over  an  industrially  broken-down  Europe, 
is  given  prominence  in  Mr.  H.  N.  Brailsford's  ex- 
cellent article,  "Rural  Europe  Comes  to  Power." 
"In  Austria,"  1  he  writes,  "the  clerical  and  conserva- 
tive peasants  regard  socialistic  Vienna  (mild  as  its 
socialism  is)  as  a  Babylon  of  iniquity,  and  there  are 
even  signs  of  it  in  the  feeling  of  the  rural  districts 
towards  Berlin."  Mr.  Brailsford  depicts  a  very  de- 
pressing spectacle.  His  picture  is  of  an  illiterate, 
backward  peasantry,  no  longer  compelled  to  pay 
tribute  to  the  towns  in  taxes  or  mortgages  (except 
in  a  depreciated  currency  of  which  they  already  have 

lNew  Republic,  18  August,  1920. 

140 


The  COUNTRY  versus  the  TOWN 

more  than  they  want),  starving  the  bigger  towns, 
living  more  and  more  self-contained  and  self-sup- 
porting lives,  led  by  the  clericals  as  our  own  rural 
Middle  West  is  to-day  too  largely  led  by  the  broken- 
down  evangelical  cretinism  so  well  exhibited  in  Mr. 
Howell's  last  novel;  foreign  trade  sunk  to  negligible 
proportions,  the  whole  of  Central  Europe  divided 
into  green  plains,  each  "governed  by  its  own  junker 
peasants  and  clergy,"  which  "will  feed  itself  and 
produce  a  surplus  barely  sufficient  for  the  millions  of 
hungry  miners  and  weavers." 

This  picture  of  a  yokel  ochlocracy — such  as,  in 
matters  of  taste  and  morals,  we  are  already  getting 
hints  of  in  our  own  country — bodes  an  unpleasant 
generation  for  the  civilised  man.  But  we  feel  that 
Mr.  Brailsford  has  let  his  pessimism  run  away  with 
him.  The  country  when  all  is  said  and  done  needs 
the  town  too  much  to  let  it  perish  wholly;  some  sort 
of  compromise  will  be  struck;  modern  industrialism 
has  penetrated  too  deeply  to  be  as  easily  disposed 
of  as  this  article  implies.  And  even  in  the  question 
of  morals,  what  would  the  country  do  if  it  had  not 
these  "sinks  of  iniquity"  to  rail  against?  It  must 
preserve  a  certain  measure  of  vice  in  cities,  if  only 
to  keep  its  evangelical  fervour  at  a  sufficient  ten- 
sion. 

Ultimately,  moreover,  this  chastening  of  the  town 
by  the  country  will  hardly  be  wholly  evil.  It  will 
tend  towards  decentralisation  of  power;  towards 
variation  in  habits  and  customs.  It  will  clean  out 
the  city  of  many  of  its  useless  non-producers.  It 
will  bring  a  sharper  sense  of  realties  to  an  over- 

141 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

sophisticated  generation  of  urban  workers.  And 
in  the  final  analysis,  the  farmer  or  the  peasant  is 
not  conservative  at  all,  as  we  city-folk  understand 
conservatism.  He  is  not  really  socially-minded.  He 
is  individualistic  to  the  point  of  anarchism,  and  re- 
gards to-day — as  he  has  for  generations — govern- 
ment as  a  mere  impertinence  and  interference.  Let 
the  cities  get  rid  of  their  meddlesome  political  gov- 
ernments that  are  always  dragging  him  away  from 
his  crops  into  some  war  that  he  cares  nothing  about, 
let  them  stop  taxing  him  for  the  support  of  armies 
that  do  him  no  good  and  for  the  support  of  public 
officials  intent  only  on  fixing  new  burdens  upon  him. 
Let  the  cities  deal  directly  with  him  on  the  basis  of 
a  real  exchange  of  goods,  and  the  surplus  will  be 
sufficient  to  keep  up  the  arts  and  sciences  as  a  going 
concern. 

The  country  too  long  has  paid  tribute  to  the  city. 
The  economic  upsets  of  the  war  have  given  it  its 
opportunity  for  revenge;  and  to-day  in  Europe  in 
the  matter  of  food,  and  in  America  in  the  matter  of 
morals,  it  is  too  harsh  in  that  revenge.  Yet  in  the 
long  run,  if  the  city  will  learn  the  lesson  of  free 
economic  co-operation,  the  revenge  of  to-day  will 
perform  its  service  in  ushering  in  the  franker  give 
and  take  of  to-morrow. 


142 


The  CLAIMS  of  LOYALTY 

Among  the  recruiting  posters  in  England  in  the 
early  days  of  the  war  was  one  bearing  excerpts 
from  the  funeral  oration  of  Pericles,  excerpts  which 
were  supposed  to  kindle  the  patriotic  enthusiasm  of 
the  Manchester  clerk  equally  with  that  of  the  Welsh 
coal-miner.  No  employment  pf  an  historical  exam- 
ple could  well  have  been  more  grotesque.  The 
Athenians  excelled  in  patriotism  because  it  was  at- 
tached to  something  they  knew  and  loved,  their  city. 
It  was  no  mystical  object.  As  Mr.  Zimmern  has 
finely  said: 

And  when  his  city  brought  forth  not  merely  fighters  and 
bards,  but  architects  and  sculptors,  and  all  the  resources  of 
art  reinforced  the  influence  of  early  association  and  natural 
beauty,  small  wonder,  as  Pericles  said,  that  the  Greek  citizen 
needed  but  to  look  at  his  city  to  fall  in  love  with  her.  The 
Athenian  had  loved  the  Acropolis  rock  while  it  was  still 
rough  and  unlevelled,  when  the  sun,  peeping  over  Hymettus, 
found  only  ruddy  crags  and  rude  Pelasgian  blocks  to  il- 
lumine. He  loved  it  tenfold  now,  when  its  marble  temples 
caught  the  first  gleam  of  the  morning  or  stood  out,  in  the 
dignity  of  perfect  line,  against  a  flaming  sunset  over  the 
mountains  of  the  West. 

This  was  something  one  could  be  loyal  to — one's 
city,  with  its  walls,  its  market-place,  its  lyceum,  its 
gardens  on  the  hillsides.  One  saw  it  every  day;  one 
knew  its  intimate  moods,  the  quality  of  its  mornings 
and  sunsets,  the  festivals  and  games  that  were  part 

H3 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

of  its  common  civic  life.     One  was  an  honoured  cit- 
izen in  it,  not  a  mere  anonymity  with  a  franchise. 

Now  that  some  of  the  warped  judgments  of  war- 
time are  disappearing,  our  leaders  in  "Americanisa- 
tion"  are  becoming  dimly  aware  that  something  is 
radically  wrong,  as  in  England  to-day  those  who 
once  shouted  the  patriotic  shibboleths  most  loudly 
and  echoed  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  cry  of  "Make  Eng- 
land a  land  fit  for  heroes  to  live  in"  are  also  dimly 
aware  that  this  pious  slogan  and  the  present-day 
facts  of  widespread  unemployment  do  not  go  prop- 
erly together.  Their  intuition  is  eminently  correct. 
Our  own  leaders  in  this  movement  to  make  patriot- 
ism a  vital  thing  are  now  realising — even  if  they  will 
not  openly  acknowledge  it — that  the  "patriotism" 
of  our  youth  during  the  war  was,  to  an  amazing  ex- 
tent, artificial  and  hysterical.  It  was  not  based  on 
reason,  or  on  a  sense  of  justice,  or  on  an  affection  for 
that  vague  entity  known  as  the  State.  For  the  most 
part  it  came  from  social  pressures  quite  different 
in  their  origin;  and  those  few  sincere  idealists  who 
were  tricked  into  believing  that  they  were  enlisting 
in  a  war  to  end  war  probably  feel  more  embittered 
than  those  who  went  into  it  with  no  such  illusions. 
In  any  event  our  "Americanisers"  are  conscious  of 
a  vast,  if  inarticulate,  disaffection  in  the  youth  of 
to-day.  They  are  bewildered  and  a  little  frightened 
by  it,  so  they  suggest  compulsory  military  training, 
"education  in  citizenship  and  American  ideals," 
teaching  of  English  to  immigrants,  patriotic  pageants 
and  the  like.  They  bristle  with  expedients  for  ob- 
taining from  others  that  loyalty  which  they — usu- 

144 


The  CLAIMS  of  LOYALTY 

ally  for  unconscious  motives  of  protection  of  prop- 
erty or  prestige — think  they  so  keenly  feel  them- 
selves, but  which  in  any  case  they  vaguely  realise  as 
lacking  in  those  to  whom  they  would  give  their  unin- 
vited ministrations. 

The  trouble  with  all  these  proposals  is  not  in 
their  absence  of  good-will,  but  in  their  psychological 
ineptitude.  They  are  typical  of  that  appalling  igno- 
rance of  normal  human  nature  which  seems  to  be  an 
almost  inevitable  accompaniment  of  large-scale  in- 
dustrialism and  the  machine-era.  The  Greeks  had 
no  problem  of  patriotism  at  all;  it  was  as  natural 
for  them  to  be  patriotic  as  it  is  with  us  to  protect 
those  we  love.  They  knew  their  city  as  we  know  our 
college  halls  and  campus,  indeed,  much  better,  for 
they  lived  with  it  all  their  life  and  not  merely  during 
four  impressionable  years.  They  had  neither  the 
problem  of  nationality  nor  the  problem  of  the  great 
society  to  vex  and  trouble  them.  In  fact,  when  we 
look  back  to  the  time  of  Pericles,  and  reflect  on  the 
long  course  of  years  since,  how  recent  is  the  whole 
concept  of  nationality!  It  was  unknown  to  the 
Greeks;  it  was  hardly  felt  by  the  Romans;  again 
it  was  unknown  in  the  Middle  Ages,  which  resulted 
in  the  increasing  power  of  dynasties  (entities  to 
which  the  ordinary  man  could  cling)  and,  after  the 
Reformation,  the  division  of  Europe  into  strictly 
Protestant  and  strictly  Catholic  communities  rather 
than  into  nations  as  we  understand  them  to-day. 
Then,  too,  the  industrial  revolution  had  not  taken 
place — a  comparatively  recent  phenomenon  in  the 
affairs  of  man — and  the  problem  of  a  great  Empire, 

145 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

such  as  the  British;  or  of  a  territorially  vast  and 
populous  single  nation,  such  as  Russia,  or  the  United 
States  in  particular,  had  not  arisen.  The  loyalties 
of  men  could  attach  themselves  to  clear,  observable 
objects  they  loved;  their  patriotism  was  simple,  sen- 
suous, immediate.  It  did  not  have  to  be,  as  ours  per- 
force must  be  if  it  is  to  exist  at  all,  conceptual  and 
imaginative. 

Of  course,  we  can  not  here  pretend  to  give  any 
answer  to  this  problem  of  loyalty;  we  can  only  hope 
to  make  one  or  two  constructive  suggestions.  First 
of  all,  we  need  an  entirely  fresh  orientation  towards 
the  whole  problem.  We  need  to  go  back  and  redis- 
cover the  fundamentals  of  human  nature — and  to 
realise  that  in  conceptual  power,  retentiveness  of 
memory,  affective  sensibility,  aesthetic  insight,  and  in- 
stinctive equipment  we  of  to-day  vary  hardly  a  jot 
or  tittle  from  the  men  of  the  golden  age  of  Greek 
city  life.  We  have  only  a  greater  mechanical  equip- 
ment that  places  before  us  an  ever-widening  and  in- 
creasingly distracting  field  of  interests;  we  have  ever 
more  claims  upon  our  loyalties,  claims  that  seem  to 
become  proportionately  tenuous  in  direct  ratio  to 
their  numerical  advance. 

Merely  to  state  the  problem  in  this  fashion  gives 
us  a  clue.  To-day,  as  it  has  been  for  ages  past,  the 
problem  of  loyalty  is  to  find  those  objects  which 
we  can  love,  to  break  through  the  miasma  of  ab- 
stractions and  concepts  and  imaginative  entities  to 
visible  and  sensuous  objects  to  which  our  affections 
can  spontaneously  cling.  How  false  and  artificial 
seems,  for  example  in  France,  the  mystical  cult  of 

146 


The  CLAIMS  of  LOYALTY 

reverence  for  la  patrie  as  contrasted  with  the  age- 
long pride  of  a  man  in  his  own  province,  his  own 
dialect,  his  own  way  of  life  in  that  province,  his 
sense  of  dignity  in  the  great  men  it  has  produced. 
How  thin  and  bloodless  seems  the  claim  to  loyalty  to 
the  State  as  compared  with  the  migratory  worker's 
claim  to  loyalty  to  the  I.  W.  W.  which  represents 
his  club,  his  friends,  his  daily  problems,  his  hope 
of  human  betterment,  his  living  vision  of  an  ulti- 
mate ideal.  How  strong  are  men's  affections  to 
their  church,  their  family,  their  immediate  neigh- 
bourhood as  compared  with  some  intangible  Federal 
entity  at  Washington. 

All  through  our  modern  life  of  complicated  or- 
ganisations runs  this  conflict  between  the  immediate 
and  the  remote;  we  are  all  familiar  with  the  doctor 
who  is  indifferent  to  his  duties  as  a  citizen  (in  the 
matter  of  voting  at  all  events)  while  keenly  alive  to 
his  duties  as  a  member  of  a  special  and  honoured 
profession.  Even  the  reformers,  though  we  may 
scoff  at  them,  are  examples  of  the  same  human  tend- 
ency; are  they  not  loyal  first  and  foremost  to  their 
particular  reform  before  they  are  loyal  to  the  larger 
claims  of  general  public  policy?  Do  they  not  feel 
that  if  they  (and  everybody  else  along  with  them) 
will  only  pay  strict  attention  to  their  particular 
reform,  all  other  things  will  be  added  unto  them? 
It  is  the  old,  old  story  that  human  nature  can  not 
be  stretched  too  far;  it  will  snap  back  to  some  definite 
thing  it  can  see  and  fondle  and  actively  share.  Pro- 
fessional propagandists  and  publicity  men  are  unan- 
imous to-day  in   saying  that  the  only  way  money 

147 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

can  now  be  raised  from  the  American  public  is  not 
through  a  national  appeal,  as  during  the  war,  but 
through  appeal  to  local  sentiment  and  local  pride. 

The  real  problem  of  the  modern  great  community, 
if  it  is  not  to  break  down  through  overweight,  is 
the  problem  of  decentralisation.  The  present  tend- 
ency in  the  United  States  is  towards  increased  cen- 
tralisation, in  a  word,  towards  bureaucracy.  Now 
bureaucracy  appeals  to  the  administrative  type  of 
mind — which  our  best  minds  unfortunately  are — be- 
cause such  a  type  of  mind  tends  to  regard  men  as 
pawns  in  a  game;  it  wants  to  strip  them  of  admin- 
istrative responsibility  so  that  the  responsibility  may 
be  concentrated  in  a  few  aristocratic  hands.  It  is 
historically  significant  that  nearly  all  great  admin- 
istrators have  been  by  temperament  aristocrats. 
But  such  concentration  of  responsibility  always  makes 
the  common  man  irresponsible  and  erratic;  and 
sooner  or  later  he  revolts  from  sheer  ennui  at  having 
all  his  problems  solved  for  him,  and  his  way  of 
life  laid  out  in  advance.  Local  autonomy  has  much 
more  than  a  political  significance ;  it  is  a  recognition 
of  perhaps  a  basic  trait  of  human  nature — the  tend- 
ency to  be  loyal  to  and  to  sacrifice  for  only  those 
objects  one  can  feel  and  actively  share.  That  is 
why  the  creative  type  of  mind  is  almost  always  hos- 
tile to  centralised  authority — because  it  does  not 
regard  men  as  pawns  in  a  game  but  as  partners  in 
a  common  adventure.  It  wants  not  to  remove  re- 
sponsibility from  men,  but  to  give  them  more  of  it. 
The  creative  type  of  mind  knows  instinctively  that 
men  are  permanently  loyal  only  to  those  things  they 

148 


The  CLAIMS  of  LOYALTY 

love,  are  responsible  for,  and  can  participate  in. 
These  contentions  seem  to  us  fundamental.  Using 
them  as  a  foundation,  we  can  only  hope  that  compe- 
tent psychologists  will  concern  themselves  with  the 
problem,  and  perhaps  give  us  suggestions  of  how  our 
multifarious  organisations  and  conflicting  claims  of 
loyalty  can  be  arranged  once  more  on  a  human  basis 
that  leaves  us  in  emotional  peace  and  sets  free  our 
creative  energies. 


149 


Through  ART  to 
INDIVIDUALISM 

Generalisations  concerning  nations  are  espe- 
cially dangerous,  for  there  are  always  specific  in- 
dividuals to  give  them  vivid  and  personal  contra- 
diction. Yet  they  have  certain  value  as  guiding- 
posts,  and  when  just,  they  usually  suggest  tolerance 
for  what  is  unlike  ourselves,  a  tolerance  of  which 
we  all  to-day  stand  particularly  in  need.  Further- 
more, such  generalisations  nowhere  apply  with  more 
force  than  in  a  discussion  of  the  aesthetic  differentia- 
tions among  nations.  Given  a  definite  set  of  cir- 
cumstances, the  economic  reaction  of  most  modern 
States  is  easily  predictable,  and  irrespective  of  lan- 
guage or  colour,  certain  social  consequences  flow 
almost  irresistibly  from  certain  social  causes.  But 
the  aesthetic  reaction  of  a  nation  is  usually  peculiar 
to  itself;  indeed  it  is  precisely  in  those  deeper  likes 
and  dislikes  which  are  properly  the  subject-matter 
of  aesthetics,  that  nations  discover  those  more  funda- 
mental differences  among  themselves  which  lead 
sometimes  to  cordial  admiration  and  sometimes  to 
war.  The  old  proverb  about  de  gustibus  ought  to 
be  revised,  for  it  represents  a  wish  rather  than  a 
fact;  economic  and  other  quarrels  can  always  be 
composed  in  the  end,  but  differences  in  taste  are 
final. 

Surveying  the  Western  nations — Russia  and  the 
150 


Through  ART  to  INDIVIDUALISM 

East,  for  the  moment,  aside — from  the  viewpoint  of 
their  aesthetic  interests,  one  broad  fact  seems  to  stand 
out.  That  broad  fact,  and  it  is  a  particularly  rele- 
vant one  at  a  time  when  Anglo-Saxon  civilisation 
more  and  more  dominates  the  West,  is  that  the  de- 
gree of  respect  for  the  individual  in  any  nation 
can  invariably  be  measured  by  the  range  and  in- 
tensity of  the  aesthetic  interests  of  that  nation.  A 
high  development  of  individualism  seems  to  be  an 
inevitable  correlative  of  any  high  development  of 
the  artistic  and  creative  impulse.  Find  a  nation  af- 
flicted with  uniformity  and  standardisation,  and  you 
will  find  a  nation  in  which  the  aesthetic  interests  are 
flickering  and  weak.  Friends  of  freedom,  libertaires 
as  the  French  term  them,  are  barking  up  the  wrong 
tree  when  they  imagine  that  the  task  before  them  is 
to  remove  restrictive  legislation;  for  hampering  blue 
laws  are  a  result  rather  than  a  cause.  They  will 
find  their  one  trustworthy  ally  in  the  artist;  and 
their  one  sure  protection  from  the  encroachments  of 
external  authority  is  in  the  fostering  of  the  aesthetic 
impulses  of  the  nation. 

Consider  France,  for  an  example.  The  French 
have  many  faults,  but  lack  of  respect  for  the  individ- 
ual, his  mind  and  his  personality,  is  not  one  of  them. 
Nowhere  in  the  Western  World  can  the  individual 
think  and  act  in  a  freer  or  more  liberating  atmos- 
phere. To  be  "different"  is  not  to  be  excommuni- 
cated; it  is  in  fact  to  be  respected  for,  and  judged 
by,  the  essential  quality  of  that  difference.  This 
cordiality  towards  individualism  extends  even  to 
colour,  where  its  connection  with  the  aesthetic  in- 

151 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

terest  is  clear.  Like  all  Latin  countries,  France  has 
little  native  colour  prejudice,  but  the  French  people's 
interest  in  and  liking  for  the  Negro  goes  much 
deeper.  They  are  delighted  with  him  as  an  aesthetic 
spectacle — in  Loti,  Gautier,  Pierre  Louys  and  in- 
numerable other  French  authors,  are  glowing  descrip- 
tions of  different  types  such  as  the  bronze  and  the 
ebony.  The  same  fine  French  quality  of  disinter- 
estedness, which  always  finds  its  best  exemplification 
in  the  genuine  artist,  is  carried  over  to  intellectual 
things.  One  is  not  thought  eccentric  in  France  if 
one  has  a  mental  individuality  of  one's  own;  to  have 
one's  peculiar  way  of  looking  at,  feeling,  and  ap- 
praising things  is  considered  as  much  one's  personal 
prerogative  as  the  right  to  choose  one's  particular 
style  of  hats.  And  with  this  fundamental  respect 
for  individuality  goes  a  deep  and  abiding  interest  in 
form  and  beauty.  It  is  no  accident  that  the  country 
in  which  human  personality  can  function  most  freely, 
remains,  for  all  its  political  vagaries  and  economic 
unsoundness,  the  country  that  still  sets  the  standard 
of  civilised  taste. 

If  we  look  a  little  further  into  the  causes  of  this, 
we  shall  be  struck  by  the  historical  fact  that  in  an 
era  of  regimentation,  uniformity  and  centralisation, 
France  has  proved  extraordinarily  resistful.  To- 
day, if  you  meet  a  countryman  on  the  streets  of  Paris 
and  ask  him  what  part  of  France  he  comes  from, 
he  will  never  say  from  such-and-such  Department, 
but  always  from  such-and-such  Province — Cham- 
pagne, Brittany,  Languedoc,  Lombardy,  Alsace.  In 
other  words,  he  refuses  to  regard  himself  as  a  crea- 

152 


Through  ART  to  INDIVIDUALISM 

ture  of  an  artificial  political  division;  he  insists  upon 
the  human  dignity  of  remaining  a  person  from  an 
ancient  province  which  has  its  own  dialect,  its  own 
traditions,  and  its  own  way  of  looking  at  life.  This 
dogged  resistance  to  all  the  modern  forces  making 
for  centralisation  and  standardisation  has  contributed 
mightily,  not  alone  to  French  literature  and  art,  but 
to  the  Frenchman's  deep  respect  for  personality. 
Present-day  observers  are  agreed  that  although  Paris 
is  a  national  capital  as  is  perhaps  no  other  city,  there 
is  a  sharp  movement  away  from  the  dominance  of 
Paris,  both  political  and  cultural.  Deep  in  the  heart 
of  every  Frenchman  is  an  incurable  contempt  for 
federal  authority,  and  in  the  France  of  to-day,  more 
than  in  any  other  "unified"  Western  country,  the 
drive  towards  decentralisation  is  strong  and  realis- 
tic. Intuitively  the  Frenchman  realises  that  there 
can  be  no  decent  art  or  decent  personal  life  in  a  coun- 
try that  is  much  standardised  or  much  regimentated. 
Within  even  so  small  a  country  as  his  own,  he  sees 
that  there  must  be  wide  cultural  variations  and  defi- 
nite social  and  traditional  differences.  At  all  costs 
it  must  avoid  a  barren  uniformity. 

Now  the  application  of  all  this  to  Anglo-Saxon 
countries,  and  to  ourselves  above  all  others,  is  very 
direct,  for  these  observations  about  France  are 
largely  true  of  other  Latin  countries,  Italy  especially, 
and  in  the  case  of  Germany,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
she  is  in  so  many  respects  exactly  like  us,  the  after- 
math of  war  propaganda  still  twists  our  judgment. 
Certainly  Americans  might  gain  a  few  wholesome 
lessons  from  the  humble  surveyal  of  these  facts.   In 

153 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

almost  every  one  of  the  ways  above  mentioned  we 
are  exactly  at  the  antipodes  to  France.  To-day  in 
America  the  forces  of  standardisation  and  centralisa- 
tion are  in  full  cry;  Federal  authority  regulates  the 
minutiae  of  our  lives,  and  our  popular  national  mag- 
azines have  developed  to  a  high  point  the  technique 
of  finding  the  lowest  common  denominator  of  taste. 
We  are  terrified  at  individuality  and  difference;  we 
think  in  terms  of  majorities.  It  extends  even  to  the 
amenities;  the  fox-trot  which  is  popular  in  New  York 
this  week  will  be  all  the  rage  in  Chicago,  New  Or- 
leans, and  San  Francisco  the  next.  Our  art  and 
music,  our  styles  of  furniture  and  handicraft,  our 
books,  our  theatre,  our  hotels,  our  moving-pictures 
par  excellence,  are  all  standardised  and  moulded  to 
a  shape  recognisable  by  all  equally.  It  is  no  accident 
that  our  more  sensitive  writers  are  always  complain- 
ing that  the  country  as  a  whole  if  far  too  big  for  one 
canvas,  yet  they  must  write  for  that  country  as  a 
whole,  if  they  want  to  be  heard  at  all.  Respect 
for  individual  human  personality  has  with  us  reached 
about  its  lowest  point;  and  it  is  delightfully  ironical 
that  no  nation  is  so  constantly  talking  about  per- 
sonality as  are  we.  We  actually  have  schools  for 
"self-expression,"  and  "self-development,"  although 
we  seem  usually  to  mean  the  expression  and  develop- 
ment of  the  personality  of  a  successful  real-estate 
agent.  Yet  if  our  civilisation  is  ever  really  to  jus- 
tify itself,  we  must  somehow  recapture  that  deeper 
respect  for  the  individual. 

But  the  way  to  that  recapture,  as  our  survey  has 
shown  us,  is  not  through  mere  futile  rebellion  by  the 

154 


Through  ART  to  INDIVIDUALISM 

younger  generation,  even  though  that  rebellion,  fu- 
tile as  it  is,  will  help.  It  is  rather  through  a  com- 
plete transvaluation  of  values;  and  it  may  actually 
be  that  we  are  not  capable  of  making  that  transvalua- 
tion. The  emphasis  must  be  placed  again,  as  it  al- 
ways is  in  periods  of  genuine  humanism,  upon  decen- 
tralisation and  wide  and  deep  variations;  upon  the 
individual  himself  rather  than  upon  the  external 
checks  and  balances  of  authority.  In  that  task  of 
shifting  the  emphasis  of  our  interest  we  must  look 
to  the  artist  for  our  greatest  help.  It  is  through  art, 
and  art  alone,  that  we  can  regain  any  individualism 
worthy  of  the  name.  We  can  be  startled  out  of  our 
eternal  preoccupation  with  commercialism  and  mor- 
alism — of  which  advantage  is  so  shrewdly  taken  that 
we  are  bound  hand  and  foot  as  soon  as  our  back  is 
turned — only  by  the  vivid  and  direct  reminder  of 
real  values  by  the  creative  artist. 


.155 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

My  English  friend  meant  to  be  polite.  But  clearly 
he  was  puzzled. 

"Why  do  all  my  young  American  friends  invari- 
ably ask  me  if  I  know  of  any  job  they  can  get  in 
England  or  Europe?  Last  month  in  Paris  1  saw 
hundreds  of  men  who  had  been  in  the  American 
army  who  had  gone  back  home  to  be  discharged  and 
had  then  scraped  together  enough  money  to  enable 
them  to  take  the  first  steamer  back  to  France.  All 
your  younger  journalists  and  writers  seem  to  be 
planning  just  one  thing — how  to  get  out  of  this 
country  by  hook  or  by  crook.  Yet  you  know  how 
impossible  Europe's  economic  condition  is  to-day 
compared  with  America's.  For  a  young  man  with- 
out independent  means  even  to  make  his  own  living 
in  Europe  to-day  is  an  onerous  task.  But  your  coun- 
trymen come  over  by  the  boat-load  in  spite  of  all  the 
difficulties.     Why  is  it?" 

Half  apologetically  I  said  something  about  intol- 
erance and  bigotry. 

"I  understand  that,"  he  said,  "even  an  outsider 
can  not  help  seeing  certain  things.  Nevertheless  you 
have,  in  your  phrase,  all  the  'makings'  of  a  great 
country  and  a  great  civilisation;  you  have  national 
youth,  abundant  resources,  an  enormous  fund  of 
goodwill  and  vitality.    The  war  has  not  crippled  you 

156 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

as  it  has  us.  The  world  lies  before  you.  America 
is  still  the  land  of  opportunity.  I  should  think  it 
would  be  a  challenge  to  your  young  men.  And  as 
for  the  unpleasant  things — I  should  think  the  ob- 
ligation to  fight  these  evils  would  be  a  stimulus.  In- 
stead, we  have  the  spectacle  of  a  young  and  vigor- 
ous nation  sending  more  and  more  of  its  best  young 
manhood  to  a  civilisation  that  quite  literally  is 
dying.  Youth  rushing  to  live  with  senility.  Why  is 
it?" 

Now  to  the  average  American  I  daresay  my  Eng- 
lish friend's  question  will  seem  unreal.  He  will 
think  of  the  score  of  young  men  he  knows  who 
haven't  the  slightest  desire  to  leave  the  country,  the 
hundreds  more  who  hope  to  buy  a  motor  car  and  own 
a  stucco  home  in  the  suburbs,  and  he  will  probably 
conclude  that  the  Englishman  had  in  mind  only  writ- 
ers, artists,  and  other  strange  fish  of  that  fry,  who 
in  the  nature  of  things  might  perhaps  be  expected 
to  be  discontented,  but  who  really  don't  matter  very 
much  one  way  or  the  other.  Indeed,  the  average 
American's  personal  opinion  is  likely  to  be  that  the 
country  will  be  just  as  well  off  without  these  trouble- 
some and  impertinent  youngsters  anyway.  The 
strong,  the  alert,  the  efficient  are  all  staying:  by  the 
light  in  their  eyes  any  one  can  see  that  some  of  them 
will  eventually  get  to  Wall  Street  and  sell  oodles 
of  fake  oil-stock  to  greedy  suckers.  No,  says  Mr. 
Average  American,  the  real  young  men  are  not  going. 
And  from  his  point  of  view  he  is  right. 

But  to  the  intelligent  foreigner,  who  can  hardly 
be  expected  to  share  our  amiable  American  preju- 

157 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

dices  in  these  matters,  the  steady  denudation  of  the 
United  States  of  its  imaginative  and  adventurous 
and  artistically  creative  young  men  is  a  sight  which 
may  well  make  him  question  the  validity  of  many  of 
our  complacent  assumptions  about  our  so-called  civ- 
ilisation. 

Those  who  take  the  trouble  to  keep  in  touch  with 
that  small  part  of  the  younger  American  generation 
which  regards  its  condition  and  quality  as  of  some- 
thing higher  than  a  piece  of  animated  lard,  know  with 
what  frank  and  disconcerting  eagerness  these  young 
men  look  forward  to  escape  from  these  shores. 
They  know  well  enough  that  the  Englishman's  ques- 
tion is  strictly  relevant.  Of  course  the  young  high- 
school  graduate  of  Topeka,  Kansas,  has  no  desire 
to  get  away,  for  he  hopefully  anticipates  a  prosper- 
ous career  of  real-estate  speculation,  and  is  well  con- 
tent to  let  a  monstrous  regiment  of  women  in  the 
Mississippi  Valley  tell  him  that  he  shall  not  drink  a 
bottle  of  wine  in  cosmopolitan  New  York,  nor 
smoke  a  cigarette  in  rural  Nebraska,  nor  read  "Les 
Chansons  de  Bilitis"  anywhere  north  of  the  Rio 
Grande.  If  the  young  Topekan  finds  the  repressions 
and  regulations  getting  too  much  for  him,  he  can 
with  a  slight  degree  of  effort  organise  a  little  lynch- 
ing party  and  let  off  steam  that  way.  Certain  mem- 
bers of  the  esteemed  Turkish  nation  have  followed 
this  technique  for  years;  in  Armenian  atrocities  the 
Turk  has  found  a  first-class  compensation  for  the 
emotional  aridity  of  his  teetotalism,  and  while  we 
unfortunately  haven't  any  Armenians  handy  to  ex- 
terminate, we  had  excellent  substitutes  during  19 17 

158 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

and  19 1 8  in  the  pro-Germans,  and  during  19 19  and 
1920  we  have  done  pretty  well  with  the  "Reds," 
and  of  course  there  are  always  our  coloured  citizens 
to  fall  back  upon.  No,  what  is  pleasantly  termed  the 
"backbone  of  the  country"  will  not  go.  They  never 
do.  But  what  William  James  once  said  of  his  uni- 
versity is  equally  true  of  his  country — our  irrecon- 
cilables  are  our  proudest  product;  and  it  is  precisely 
our  irreconcilables  who  are  going. 

Something  must  be  radically  wrong  with  a  culture 
and  a  civilisation  when  its  youth  begins  to  desert  it. 
Youth  is  the  natural  time  for  revolt,  for  experiment, 
for  a  generous  idealism  that  is  eager  for  action. 
Any  civilisation  which  has  the  wisdom  of  self-preser- 
vation will  allow  a  certain  margin  of  freedom  for 
the  expression  of  this  youthful  mood.  But  the  plain, 
unpalatable  fact  is  that  in  America  to-day  that  mar- 
gin of  freedom  has  been  reduced  to  the  vanishing 
point.  Rebellious  youth  is  not  wanted  here.  In  our 
environment  there  is  nothing  to  challenge  our  young 
men;  there  is  no  flexibility,  no  colour,  no  possibility 
for  adventure,  no  chance  to  shape  events  more  gen- 
erously than  is  permitted  under  the  rules  of  highly 
organised  looting.  All  our  institutional  life  com- 
bines for  the  common  purpose  of  blackjacking  our 
youth  into  the  acceptance  of  the  status  quo;  and  not 
acceptance  of  it  merely,  but  rather  its  glorification. 
(I  recall  a  fine  passage  of  Plato  wherein  he  says 
that  one  of  the  real  virtues  of  youth  is  its  ability  to 
be  shocked  at  things  as  they  are.)  In  industry,  com- 
merce, science — especially  in  so  vital  a  subject  as 
educational  psychology  where  any  real  revolution 

159 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

will  be  begun — in  medicine  and  law,  and  in  the  game 
of  hoodwinking  morons  (otherwise  known  as  poli- 
tics) the  field  in  America  is  open  and  the  oppor- 
tunities are  great.  But  in  literature,  art,  music,  the 
labour-movement,  the  theatre — in  brief,  in  all  those 
activities  where  the  creative  instincts  of  youth  have 
freest  play,  science  alone  excepted — the  field  in 
America  is  closed. 

Even  in  science  the  exception  is  more  apparent 
than  real.  Big  business  has  somehow  managed  to 
identify  science,  and  psychology  along  with  it,  as  a 
mysterious  ally  of  efficiency,  economy  and  all  the 
other  shibboleths  of  what  it  assumes  is  the  summum 
bonum  of  life,  increased  production.  Big  business 
is  willing  to  subsidise  universities  and  laboratories 
and  research  because  it  thinks  that  money  so  given 
will  return  enriched  pragmatically,  if  not  in  hard 
cash,  an  hundredfold.  Perhaps  it  will,  but  when 
the  financiers  discover  that  the  best  psychologists 
are  working  for  an  educational  revolution  that  will 
exorcise  from  the  minds  of  our  children  their  inhibi- 
tions and  fears,  and  will  enable  them  to  think  straight 
enough  to  know  how  to  go  about  changing  our  pres- 
ent economic  system,  perhaps  they  will  not  be  so  gen- 
erous with  their  cash.  For  any  development  of  the 
true  scientific  spirit  will  be  fatal  to  the  present  waste- 
ful order  of  things.  But  to-day  the  number  of  men, 
either  in  business  or  in  the  universities  who  see  the 
implications  of  endowing  research,  psychological  re- 
search in  particular,  are  but  a  handful.  The  suc- 
cessful business  man  regards  such  endowment  as  a 
graceful  way  of  capping  his  career,  as  well  as  the 

1 60 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

fulfilment  of  an  ethical  obligation;  he  is  seldom  in- 
telligent enough  to  contemplate  the  consequences. 
The  university  man,  too,  is  equally  blind  in  most 
cases;  he  shares  all  the  current  prejudices  and  clings 
to  the  current  taboos.  Even  in  our  science  schools, 
as  in  all  the  rest  of  our  civilisation,  there  is  no  con- 
cession to  the  spirit  of  youth. 

At  this  point  the  practical  person  will  be  sure  to 
point  out  that  youth  resents  whatever  lack  of  oppor- 
tunity there  may  be,  chiefly  in  what  may  be  called,  for 
convenience  sake,  the  amenities  of  life.  America, 
the  practical  person  admits,  is  to-day  a  strong,  mater- 
ialistically-minded country,  but  he  says,  we  must  not 
be  too  harsh  with  her  simply  because  the  more  gra- 
cious aspects  of  life  have  not  yet  been  fully  devel- 
oped or  because  the  artist  feels  himself  crushed  by 
the  hardness  and  unmalleability  of  his  environment. 
That  is  precisely  the  point.  Youth  is  not  interested, 
and  rightly  not  interested,  merely  in  material  suc- 
cess or  in  a  career  that  commands  the  respect  of  his 
neighbours.  Youth  does  not  care,  and  rightly  does 
not  care,  merely  to  make  money,  merely  to  "get  on." 
Youth  wants  to  savour  life,  to  enrich  its  quality  if 
he  may  and  if  he  can,  to  feel  and  experience  some- 
thing of  its  range  and  depth — youth  wants  to  make 
over  civilisation  so  that  others  may  in  increasing 
measure  do  likewise,  for  that  is  the  glorious  way  of 
youth.  Youth  is  not  content,  and  rightly  not  con- 
tent, with  shaping  its  life  to  conventional  ends  alone 
— to  marry,  "settle  down,"  mow  the  lawn,  drive  its 
own  Ford,  read  the  popular  magazines,  join  a  lodge, 
go  to  the  movies,  drink  grapejuice,  vote  blatherskites 

161 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

into  political  office,  listen  to  incompetent  preachers 
holding  forth  on  doctrines  in  which  no  one  with  an 
ounce  of  grey  matter  any  longer  believes,  send  its 
children  to  schools  and  colleges  to  have  their  minds 
devastated  with  bad  philosophy  and  worse  economics, 
and  get  its  only  excitement  occasionally  out  of  the 
vicarious  thrill  which  accompanies  Babe  Ruth's  feat 
of  knocking  a  home  run. 

To  accept  life  as  it  is  and  make  the  best  of  it,  may 
be  an  admirable  quality  in  middle-aged  men,  as  it  is 
a  lovable  quality  in  old  men,  but  it  is  a  horrible 
thing  in  a  young  man.  The  intransigeant  spirit  of 
youth  focusses  its  aspiration  upon  the  quality  of  life. 
It  demands  something  richer  and  more  varied  than 
is  thought  good  for  it  by  the  W.  C.  T.  U.  of  Centre- 
ville,  Ohio.  It  demands  also  that  it  shall  have  the 
opportunity  to  help  make  over  into  something  finer 
than  we  now  know,  the  civilisation  of  which  it  is  a 
part.  But  in  America  youth  is  permitted  to  do 
neither  one  thing  nor  the  other. 

The  other  day  in  an  unguarded  moment,  Mr. 
Mark  Sullivan  let  the  cat  out  of  the  bag  in  a  dis- 
patch to  the  Evening  Post  of  New  York.  Mr.  Sul- 
livan was  giving  a  post-mortem  explanation  as  to 
why  the  ruling  clique  in  the  Republican  Party  has 
settled  upon  Senator  Harding  as  a  candidate,  rather 
than  upon  any  of  the  other  men  who  were  equally 
acceptable  to  the  ruling  powers.  He  cited  several 
reasons,  and  then  picked  out  the  human  motive 
which  made  the  choice  irresistible.  Senator  Hard- 
ing, he  explained,  was  a  man  after  their  own  hearts, 
a  mediocrity  like  themselves.    The  Old  Guard  could 

162 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

be  comfortable  with  him;  if  any  of  the  boys  met  him 
on  the  Main  Street  of  their  "dismal"  home-towns, 
they  could  talk  to  him  free  and  easy-like  with  no  self- 
consciousness  or  embarrassment. 

Now  the  adjective  "dismal"  is  not  mine,  but  Mr. 
Sullivan's.  And  although,  if  his  attention  were 
called  to  it,  Mr.  Sullivan  might  describe  it  as  an  in- 
advertence, the  word  is  unerring  and  deadly.  The 
dispatch  was  probably  written  in  haste  with  little 
chance  for  careful  revision,  which  makes  the  choice 
of  that  particular  word  all  the  more  revealing  of 
what  the  writer  really  thought.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
nothing  could  be  more  exact.  That  is  precisely  the 
trouble  with  these  home-towns.  They  are  dismal, 
dismal  beyond  the  endurance  of  men  who,  after  all, 
are  the  children  of  those  who  once  built  real  civilisa- 
tions, and  among  whom,  on  occasion,  must  be  a  youth 
who  remembers.  In  these  "dismal"  places  there  is 
no  art,  no  music,  no  drama,  no  intellectual  life,  no 
festivals  and  gala  days  that  are  not  a  mockery  of 
gaiety,  no  religion  that  can  summon  and  cleanse  emo- 
tion, no  concept  of  morality  except  a  rancid,  super- 
ficial Puritanism  combined,  as  is  usually  the  case — 
with  an  inward  sordidness  and  hypocrisy,  no  sense 
of  the  joy  of  life,  no  graciousness,  no  urbanity. 
These  home-towns  are  rural  in  a  bad  sense,  through 
and  through,  self-complacent,  envious  and  intolerant 
of  what  they  do  not  understand,  successful  enough 
materially  but  living  a  life  that  is  wholly  dominated 
by  a  conventional  fear  of  the  worst  kind — a  fear  of 
what  people  will  say. 

This  is  an  indictment,  and  it  is  meant  to  be  an  in- 
163 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

dictment.  The  same  idea  is  vulgarly  expressed  in 
the  popular  song,  "How  Are  You  Goin'  to  Keep  'Em 
Down  On  the  Farm,  After  They've  Seen  Paree," — a 
song  which  contains  much  homely  wisdom  and  may 
be  commended  to  the  attention  of  all  Bishops  and 
pastors. 

Before  the  war,  of  course  one  could  escape  from 
this  rural  horror  by  migrating  to  the  cities,  and  most 
young  men  who  possessed  the  imagination  of  a  min- 
now took  full  advantage  of  their  opportunities.  But 
to-day  the  big  city  has  been  made  over  into  the  like- 
ness of  the  home-town.  The  home-town  has  always 
been  jealous  of  the  city,  and  now  at  last  it  has  suc- 
ceeded in  making  the  city  nearly  as  uncivilised  and 
dismal  as  itself. 

In  plain  truth,  the  whole  country  is  engulfed  in 
a  flood  of  petty  regulations  of  all  kinds,  and  ener- 
getic organisations,  devoted  to  the  task  of  meddling 
with  everything  and  seeing  that  everybody  is  as  dull 
and  stupid  as  themselves,  to-day  hold  the  whip  hand. 
The  Eighteenth  Amendment  is  but  a  symbol  of  the 
times.  It  stands,  in  fact,  for  the  prohibition  of 
everything.  What  we  Americans  are  insanely  try- 
ing to  do  is  to  make  our  civilisation  fool-proof.  The 
chances  are  it  can  not  be  done,  yet  in  so  far  as  we 
succeed,  we  shall  discover  that  we  are  making  it 
genius-proof  as  well.  Civilisation  can  not  be  justi- 
fied if  it  does  not  cherish  enough  freedom  to  permit 
a  man  to  go  to  hell  in  his  own  way.  And  in  the 
twentieth-century  America  the  chances  are  becom- 
ing slimmer  and  slimmer  every  day  of  leading  any 
other  kind  of  life  than  the  monotonous  majority- 

164 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

ruled,  unimaginative  existence  of  the  great  average. 
Youth  is  gradually  awakening  to  this  dreary  fact 
and  is  properly  resentful. 

Yet  youth  of  the  real  sort  would  gladly  stick  it 
out  if  the  opportunity  to  change  the  environment  in 
any  appreciable  way  were  offered.  No  man  wants  to 
abandon  his  own  country  if  it  is  humanly  possible  to 
avoid  doing  so.  We  are  home-loving  animals;  that 
simple,  natural  patriotism  for  the  soil  from  which  we 
sprang — quite  unlike  the  artificial  patriotism  for  the 
national  state,  with  which  it  is  generally  confused — is 
rooted  deep  down  in  all  of  us.  But  in  these  days 
what  opportunity  has  a  young  man  to  effect  any  such 
appreciable  change  in  his  American  environment? 
Practically  none  at  all.  All  doubts  on  this  score  will 
be  dissipated  in  a  moment  by  reading  a  few  typical 
commencement  exhortations  of  this  present  year. 
What  is  the  burden  of  all  of  them?  "Gentlemen  of 
the  graduating  class,  we  stand  at  a  great  crisis  in 
civilisation.  The  rest  of  the  world  is  in  the  grip  of 
chaos  and  Bolshevism.  America  stands  as  Gibraltar 
against  the  onrushing  tide  of  anarchy !  We  must  re- 
turn to  those  great  principles  on  which  our  country 
was  founded.  We  must  create  a  new  reverence  for 
that  immortal  instrument,  the  American  Constitution 
(cheers),  struck  off  by  those  great  minds  in  1787 
..."  Think  of  it! — 1787,  over  130  years  ago. 
Our  form  of  government  is  to-day  one  of  the  oldest 
among  modern  states,  as  it  is  the  most  conservative. 
Yet  the  appeal  to  our  youth  is  always  to  throw  all 
its  vitality  behind  the  preservation  of  that  ancient 
form.     The  same  strain  runs  through  all  the  busi- 

165 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

ness,  professional  and  moral  exhortations  to  the 
youth  of  America.  Art  and  literature  are  seldom 
mentioned  of  course,  and  then  only  in  a  half-apolo- 
getic manner  and  with  a  gibe  at  "the  vagaries  of  the 
present  day." 

In  short  the  institutional  life  of  America  is  a  com- 
bination for  the  blackjacking  of  our  youth  into  the 
acceptance  of  the  status  quo  not  of  1920,  but  of  the 
late  eighteenth  century  in  government,  of  the  early 
nineteenth  century  in  morals  and  culture,  and  of  the 
stone  age  in  business.  If  the  young  man  of  to-day 
still  has  enough  native  vitality  and  intellectual  power 
to  attempt  to  break  these  chains  he  will  be  made  to 
pay  too  high  a  price.  If  his  interest  is  in  literature, 
he  must  either  become  popular  or  starve;  if  in  art, 
he  must  choose  between  flattering  the  vanity  of  silly 
rich  people  or  enduring  misunderstanding  and  neg- 
lect; if  in  the  theatre,  he  must  reach  the  lowest  com- 
mon denominator  of  Broadway  or  the  movies  or  put 
all  his  energies  into  the  struggle  to  make  a  bare  liv- 
ing. Of  course  there  are  exceptions;  but  the  point 
is  that  they  are  exceptions.  These  exceptions  are  not 
accepted  generously;  they  are  merely  tolerated,  and 
even  then  with  some  impatience.  Every  social  influ- 
ence in  the  country  is  against  them.  Small  wonder 
then  that  they  look  with  such  eager  eyes  towards 
Europe. 

My  English  friend  was  mistaken  when  he  spoke  of 
our  youth  rushing  to  live  with  senility.  It  is  youth 
rushing  to  live  with  youth  of  its  own  kind.  One  of 
the  most  amazing  results  of  Europe's  years  of  misery 
has  been  the  quickening  of  all  kinds  of  cultural  and 

166 


WHAT  Can  a  YOUNG  MAN  DO? 

intellectual  life.  In  spite  of  starvation,  disease,  po- 
litical chaos,  the  breakdown  of  all  the  old  standards 
of  life — indeed,  perhaps  because  of  them — the  peo- 
ple who  are  interested  in  art  and  literature  and  music 
and  the  theatre  and  revolution  (the  genuine  article, 
not  our  imitation  kind)  can  find  all  those  interests 
satisfied  in  Europe  to-day.  There  are  music  festivals 
m  Vienna  even  though  the  children  are  starving. 
The  youth  who  wants  to  take  part  in  a  real  revolu- 
tion can  do  so  in  Italy  to-day,  though  food  and  fuel 
are  lacking.  For  those  who  seek  carnival  and  the 
Latin  spirit  there  is  still  Paris,  though  France  is  face 
to  face  with  financial  ruin.  Those  to  whom  the 
theatre  means  everything  will  get  the  stimulation 
they  need  in  Berlin  and  Munich,  though  Germany 
lives  under  the  treaty  of  Versailles.  And  for  the 
more  adventurous  there  is  Russia. 

Who  can  wonder  that  the  young  men  we  should 
do  our  best  to  keep  with  us  are  leaving  on  every  boat. 
It  is- not  surprising  that  they  turn  with  disgust  from 
such  self-conscious  and  helpless  groups  as  the  Young 
Democracy  and  the  League  of  Youth  and  the  rest. 
They  are  not  deceived  by  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  Chau- 
tauqua lamb  masquerading  as  the  revolutionary 
lion ;  they  know  well  enough  that  all  the  fine  phrases 
about  democracy  and  co-operation  are  merely  mid- 
dle-class, Anglo-Saxon,  morality  impulses  disguised 
in  new  terms.  They  are  heartily  tired  of  the  fake. 
They  want  the  real  thing,  and  their  sure  instinct  tells 
them  that  in  Europe  (not  in  England  of  course), 
even  in  the  Europe  that  is  dying  from  the  follies 
and  crimes  of  its  old  men,  life  can  still  be  lived. 

167 


AMERICA  and  the  YOUNG  INTELLECTUAL 

And  we  who,  because  of  one  obligation  or  another, 
must  for  a  shorter  or  longer  time  stay  behind,  can 
not  we  be  permitted  to  accord  to  youth  as  it  ventures 
forth  our  admiration  for  its  courage  and  perhaps 
envy  it  a  little?  Can  not  we  do  something  to  make  it 
possible  that  the  answer  to  the  question  set  forth  as 
the  title  of  this  paper  must  not  forever  be — Get  out  \ 


THE   END 


1 68 


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